The Tourism That Emerged in 2025

In 2025, tourist overnight stays in Italy as measured by Istat exceeded 535 million, an increase of 69.3 million over the previous year. A 15% rise, driven by an "explosion" in the Mezzogiorno (+25%), makes the past year look exceptional for Italian tourism. The data are correct; the conclusion is wrong.

Since 2025, the official statistics have widened their perimeter: they now include the flows of privately owned accommodation rented out on a non-business basis, a segment that until the previous year entered the counts only to a minimal extent. A very large share of the apparent growth is made up not of new tourists but of tourists who were already there and are now being counted. We tried to put a number on this hypothesis by reconstructing how many overnight stays 2025 would have recorded had the rules not changed. Three messages came out of it, and we will return to them at the end. First: at least four fifths of the national increase is statistical emergence and real growth lies between one and a half and two and a half percentage points, which makes 2025 a year zero, not comparable with 2024. Second: the effect was uneven across the territory for reasons that have nothing to do with tourism, to the point that the raw data overturn the ranking of the most dynamic areas. Third: none of this is bad news for data quality – quite the opposite – provided the data are used with an awareness of what has changed.

A bit of methodology

The method rests on a fortunate asymmetry: the revision concerns only the extra-hotel sector and, within it, only the rented accommodation item. Hotels, campsites, agritourism farms and bed and breakfasts continue to be surveyed exactly as before, and in this sense they work as a control group: if tourist demand had really grown by double digits in 2025, that growth should show up there too, where the yardstick has not changed.

The second step served to quantify. We built a counterfactual, that is, an estimate of what rented accommodation would have recorded without the revision, by applying to this type of accommodation the growth rate recorded on average by the others. The difference between the value thus expected and the one actually recorded is the estimate of the emergence. Since the result depends on which term of comparison is chosen, we repeated the calculation under three different hypotheses:

1. rented accommodation grows in 2025 like the hotel sector (1.5%); this is the most distant term of comparison, a structurally different sector in a mature phase;
2. rented accommodation grows like all the other extra-hotel types taken together (1.9%), the offer most similar in nature and in clientele;
3. rented accommodation keeps the pace at which it grew over the previous decade (8% a year). This is the most generous hypothesis because it grants this category all the autonomous dynamic it had before the revision.

The three estimates converge within a narrow range, and that is what we consider reliable. All the figures that follow come from a single source, the Istat survey on the movement of customers in accommodation establishments.

Not a different tourism, but a statistic that sees more

The widening of the perimeter was made possible by the mandatory adoption of the Codice Identificativo Nazionale (CIN, National Identification Code), introduced by article 13-ter of decree-law 145/2023 and in force since 1 January 2025 for all accommodation facilities and for every property intended for short-term or tourist rental. Through the Banca Dati delle Strutture Ricettive of the Ministero del Turismo (the Ministry of Tourism's database of accommodation facilities), interoperable with the regional databases, the CIN has for the first time systematically recorded a segment of supply that until then was registered in a patchy, leopard-spot fashion.

Industry insiders are perfectly aware of this phenomenon: those overnight stays existed, they were visible on any intermediation platform, they generated traffic, pressure on services and competition for the official facilities. They simply did not appear fully in the official statistics. The CIN did not create those flows: it made them measurable.

Of the 69.3 million additional overnight stays recorded in 2025, a full 62.9 million sit in a single item: rented accommodation, which almost doubles in a single year, going from 71.8 to 134.7 million. These stays account for 91% of the entire national increase. All the other types move within the range of a normal year: hotels grow by 1.5%, campsites by 1.3%, bed and breakfasts by 0.5%, other establishments by 0.4%. Only agritourism farms, at 6.6%, show somewhat livelier dynamics (figure 1).

Figure 1 — Where the 2025 increase in overnight stays comes from

Read this way, 2025 stops being a mysterious year. There was no widespread wave of visitors rewarding every form of hospitality: there was one category that doubled while all the others proceeded at a more regular pace, and that category is the only one whose content was extended.

What the emergence is worth

As a result of this dynamic, the share of extra-hotel overnight stays in the total went from 39.1% to 46.2% in a single year: more than seven points, when over the previous decade it gained little more than half a point a year. To understand how much of this jump is emergence and how much is actual growth in short-term rentals, we estimated what level rented accommodation would have reached in 2025 under the three hypotheses described above: growth equal to hotels; growth equal to the other extra-hotel types; growth equal to the pace the same category recorded in the previous ten years.

Overall, without the revision rented accommodation would have closed 2025 at between 73 and 77.5 million overnight stays, depending on the hypothesis, not the 134.7 that we read in the data. The difference – between 57 and 62 million overnight stays – is the emergence. Set against the overall increase for the year, this means that of the 69.3 million additional overnight stays recorded in 2025, between 57 and 62 million were already there the year before and simply were not being counted. The truly new ones therefore lie between 7.5 and 12 million: growth between +1.6% and +2.6%, far from the 15% that results from the published data. It is not negligible, but it is the normal trend of a mature sector (figure 2).

Figure 2 — Italy: how many overnight stays in rented accommodation without the 2025 revision

The gap between the third hypothesis and the previous ones does not appear particularly significant: in any case, none of the three readings reaches the +15% found in the raw data, and in all of them at least four fifths of the increase is emergence.

One limit remains to be declared: these calculations measure how far 2025 departs from what could have been expected, but they do not distinguish between two different aspects that sit inside that gap: the accommodation that previously escaped the survey entirely and the accommodation rented out for the first time in 2025. Distinguishing the two components would require external sources, from intermediation platform data to the register of identification codes. The order of magnitude, however, does not change: whatever reasonable hypothesis is adopted, most of 2025 is emergence.

The point that concerns those who work on destinations

If we look at the phenomenon from the territorial point of view, we are not facing merely a statistical technicality but an operational problem, because the effect of the revision was not distributed uniformly across the territory. Figure 3 shows the share of extra-hotel overnight stays in each macro-area. In 2024 the North and the Centre sit at similar values, a little above 40%, while the Mezzogiorno stays further behind, at 32.0%. In 2025, the highlighted band on the right, they all move in the same direction but with very different intensity: the North rises by 4.6 points, the Centre by 8.8, the Mezzogiorno by twelve.

One might think that the CIN, a mandatory census equal for everyone, simply brought out more where the survey previously covered less. That explains the Mezzogiorno, but not the rest. In 2024 rented accommodation weighed 16.3% of total overnight stays in the North and 15.2% in the Centre, similar values, and yet in 2025 it grows by 51% in the North and 123% in the Centre: two areas with almost the same potential submerged supply and results seventy points apart. To find a possible answer we need to go down a territorial scale.

Figure 3 — Share of extra-hotel overnight stays by macro-area, 2014-2025

Figure 4 shows the growth in overnight stays in rented accommodation in each region. The picture is clearly very varied: it ranges from +4% in Veneto to +313% in Sicily. Within the North, Veneto, Liguria and Bolzano, all under 10%, coexist with Piedmont at +217%: the spread inside a single macro-area is wider than the one between macro-areas. The case that settles the question is in Trentino-Alto Adige: Bolzano +9%, Trento +125%.

Figure 4 — Change in overnight stays in rented accommodation by region, 2024-2025

Two neighbouring autonomous provinces, the same model of mountain tourism, the same clientele, incompatible results. It is hard to find a tourism-related explanation, while an administrative one is easy to come by: each region and autonomous province manages its own accommodation database, and where non-business landlords were already obliged to register and transmit their movements, there was little left to bring out in 2025. It is the hypothesis most consistent with the data, even though the data alone do not prove it.

What, then, is left of each area's growth?

Figure 5 sets three values side by side for each macro-area: the raw figure, the growth that remains once the emergence is removed, and the hotel sector, which the revision did not touch and which works as an independent control. The North, which on the raw figure grows by 9.8%, actually grows between 1.8% and 2.6% (hotel growth somehow confirms this with +1.5%). The Mezzogiorno apparently stands at +25% while it would really grow between 3.4% and 4.7%. The Centre, which the raw figure puts at +18.7%, is in fact stagnating: the adjusted estimate lies between −0.2% and +1.3%.

Figure 5 — How much tourism has really grown in the three macro-areas

The gap between North and Mezzogiorno, then, exists – the South really did grow about twice as much as the North – but it is half of what the raw numbers tell: four points against two and a half (not twenty-five against ten). And the most instructive case is the Centre, which on the raw figure looks like the second most dynamic area in the country while in reality it is standing still. In other words, using raw variations will not serve to describe the geography of Italian tourism so much as the geography of the different arrangements of administrative obligations.

Concluding notes

2025 is a year zero, not a record year. Any comparison of 2025 with 2024 – in a dossier, in a financial report, in a bid, in a press release – should come with a warning that the two years do not measure the same perimeter. For those managing a destination the worst risk is not getting a number wrong but building the strategy of the coming years on a starting base that never existed, and then having to justify the failure to replicate it in 2026. The good news is that the break is a one-off event and not a permanent drift of the official statistics: if the emergence depends on the entry into force of the CIN, 2026 will be the first year fully comparable with 2025, and from there on the series become readable again.

Territorial benchmarks need to be revised. The raw figure does not merely exaggerate the differences between territories, it distorts the hierarchies. The Centre appears to be the second most dynamic area in Italy when in fact it is stationary; the Mezzogiorno really does grow more than the North, but by half as much as it seems. If you are positioning your destination against a group of competitors, you need to check that the comparison is not rewarding whoever simply had more unrecorded supply. This applies to DMO dashboards, to reports to funding bodies and to any analysis carried out in these months.

Emergence is a gain, not a loss. Discovering that about half of Italian overnight stays go through the extra-hotel sector and that rented accommodation alone accounts for a quarter of them means being able to consolidate an information base better suited to making decisions: flow management, tourist tax, regulation of short-term rentals, sizing of public services in peak months. These are data that were simply missing before, and their absence weighed on a long period of policies built on a partial picture.