What Italy's Jubilee Year Is Teaching Us About Hotel Leadership

Editorial

Rome, 20 January 2026

The Catholic Jubilee Year, declared by Pope Francis for 2025, brought an extraordinary number of visitors to Italy, and particularly to Rome. Estimates suggest tens of millions of pilgrims and visitors over the course of the year, an increase that has tested the operational capacity, the staffing, and above all the leadership of the country's hotels. As we look back from early 2026, the House of ESI has had a unique vantage point on what hospitality leadership looks like under sustained, unusual demand.

This editorial sets out what the Jubilee Year has taught us about hotel leadership in 2025.

The pressure was different from peak season

The Italian luxury hotel industry is well practised at peak periods. August in Capri, September in Tuscany, the Christmas season in the great urban properties, all impose familiar pressures. Hotels are designed and staffed to manage these.

The Jubilee Year was different. The pressure was sustained across many months, not concentrated in weeks. The visitor mix was unusual, with a higher proportion of pilgrim travellers and longer average stays than typical leisure peaks. The operational demands on housekeeping, food service, and front desk teams ran higher for longer than the systems were originally designed for.

This sustained pressure separated leaders who manage well from leaders who lead well.

What the strong leaders did differently

Observation across many properties suggests four practices that distinguished the leaders who navigated the Jubilee Year well.

They protected their senior team. The instinct under sustained pressure is to push the senior team harder, to ask more, to extend more hours. Strong leaders did the opposite. They actively protected their direct reports' rest, ensured they took planned absences, and maintained a culture where exhaustion was not a badge of honour. The result, by month nine of the year, was a senior team still functioning rather than a senior team in collective burnout.

They invested early in temporary staffing partnerships. The leaders who began conversations with reliable temporary staffing partners in late 2024, rather than scrambling in the moment, had access to better quality teams when the pressure peaked. This required foresight and willingness to commit before the demand was fully visible.

They held standards visibly. Under pressure, the temptation is to let small standards slip. The breakfast service that runs ten minutes late. The room turnaround that becomes less thorough. The guest interaction that becomes briefer. Strong leaders refused this drift, even at the cost of slowing the operation. They understood that the standards that slip in busy times are often the standards that do not return.

They communicated honestly with ownership. When delays occurred, when service quality dipped, when financial expectations needed adjustment, the strong leaders raised these issues with their owners openly and early. The leaders who did not, who tried to manage the issues silently, almost always faced more difficult conversations later.

What this reveals about leadership selection

The Jubilee Year has been, in effect, a stress test for hospitality leadership in Italy. The leaders who handled it well shared certain qualities that the House of ESI has long looked for in our searches, and which the year has confirmed as decisive.

Stamina, but stamina that is informed by self management rather than martyrdom. Leaders who run themselves to exhaustion in the first months are unhelpful by the seventh.

Anticipatory thinking. The leader who prepares for what is likely is at an enormous advantage over the leader who reacts to what is actual.

Confidence in difficult conversations. Leaders who can raise problems with owners, with brands, with their own teams, in the moment when raising them is uncomfortable, prevent much larger problems later.

A clear definition of standards that does not bend with pressure.

These qualities are difficult to assess from a resume. They emerge in conversation, in scenario based assessment, and in the patient triangulation of references. They are central to how the CADT assessment is structured, which is one reason owners have requested CADT more frequently in 2025 than in any previous year of the House.

Implications for 2026 and beyond

The Jubilee Year is a singular event. But the patterns it revealed will, in our judgement, become more relevant rather than less in the coming years.

Italian hospitality continues to grow as a global investment category. The pipeline of new openings in the country, supported by recovery and modernisation funding, suggests sustained leadership demand for at least the next five to seven years. The lessons of the Jubilee Year, about which leaders succeed under pressure and which do not, will inform many of the appointments to come.

For owners planning openings or significant property repositioning in the period 2026 to 2030, the leadership selection question is no longer a matter of finding competent operators. It is a matter of finding leaders with the specific capacity to maintain standards under sustained, unusual demand.

The House of ESI has been observing this question carefully through the Jubilee Year. We expect the patterns to recur.

For owners considering leadership changes or new appointments in this evolving environment, we are at the House at Piazza del Popolo, ready for the conversation.

Echte gastvrijheid, van oudsher.

The Editorial Team
ESI Executive Search International