Ivana Jelinic, President and CEO of ENIT, spoke at Forum PA, where she addressed the issue of the lack of personnel in tourism. “The misrepresentation of the supply chain and the misrepresentation of nomenclature and consideration of skills at the sociological level has so far been a disincentive,” she said. “Being employed in the sector has long been seen as a job stopgap. There is no such thing as A-series work and B-series work. Basically, there is a cultural problem. We need a mapping of skills and the elimination of the training discretion left to training institutions, principals, and chambers of commerce, because in this way fragmentation is generated“.
Barbara Casagrande, Secretary General of the Italian Ministry of Tourism also spoke on the subject: “The two fundamental points with which you want to make tourism is to put people at the center to network and listen. We have initiated contacts with the Italian rectors for a work of reconnaissance of the fragmented paths on tourism and, in the meantime, we are starting a master’s degree, but work remains to be done on first level training. In the meantime, the Made in Italy high school has started. Everything will land on the portal of digital tourism which in 2026 will be an extraordinary tool“.
The sustainability of the tourism labor market and the recruitment of personnel has been at the center of the entire debate, because the structural lack must stimulate the sector to become more attractive. “Professional paths must be standardized, because otherwise the territories are oriented without a route and everything is left to the common sense of the operators on duty,” said Marina Lalli, President of Federturismo Confindustria. “Even if tourism has been a great social lift, because directors have often become directors by working their way up from the bottom up, it is also right that it should be structured in consideration of the strong turnover and the effort to emerge from other nations. Given the lack of personnel, government intervention on workers’ compensation and tax incentives would be necessary. In the long run, the situation can be resolved at government level by designing standardized training courses for all categories of tourism“.
According to Alessandro Massimo Nucara, General Manager of Federalberghi and President of the Bilateral National Tourist Board, the phenomenon is not only Italian and has exploded with the pandemic. “The key is to build strong relationships with collaborators,” he argued. “Working while others have fun is not easy, it’s not for everyone. Either one enters the perspective of considering work in the tourism sector as a mission or it is necessary to activate incentive policies“.
