ITI Hotels and ITI Marina: the hidden real estate value behind one of Italy’s largest hotel portfolios

ITI Hotels is not just a hotel management story. First and foremost, it is a real estate story.

The group, historically rooted in Rome and later developed mainly in Sardinia, controls a portfolio of owned hospitality assets that industry sources estimate at around fifty properties and approximately ten thousand beds. Its Sardinian perimeter, linked to ITI Marina Hotels & Resorts, currently includes 38 owned hospitality properties across the island’s leading tourist destinations.

This is the key point for any investor: the value of ITI cannot be read only through the profit and loss accounts of its individual companies. It lies in the underlying real estate. The group’s hotels, resorts and holiday villages are not merely operating units. They are tourism assets located in high-barrier destinations, often difficult to replicate, whose value depends on location, destination strength, repositioning potential and scarcity of supply.

The passing of Antonio “Tonino” Corbeddu, a historic figure in Sardinia’s tourism development and one of the key protagonists behind the ITI group, symbolically closes the cycle of the builder-entrepreneur. The industrial direction now appears increasingly concentrated around the Loi family, particularly within the ITI Marina perimeter, with Piero Loi as its most visible public figure.

The group’s recent moves point in a clear direction: real estate consolidation, a more structured relationship with the banking system, and selective openness to third-party operators in hotel management. The acquisition of the Hotel Panorama in Cagliari, the supply-chain agreement with Intesa Sanpaolo and the management agreement for Free Beach Costa Rei with TH Resorts all tell the same story: the real estate remains firmly held, while operations are progressively professionalized.

It is a logic that, on a different scale and in the ultra-luxury segment, recalls what has already happened at the top end of Costa Smeralda: real estate ownership remains in the hands of a strong patrimonial owner, while management or product positioning is entrusted to specialized operators.

For anyone observing the hotel investment market, ITI is therefore a case study: scarce assets, deep territorial roots, family governance, early signs of openness to operating partnerships and a high degree of information opacity that makes any external valuation complex.

There is no public source indicating any intention to sell the group or its portfolio. But all the elements that make ITI one of the most interesting cases to study in the evolution of Italian family-owned hospitality are present: ownership, succession, real estate value, outsourced management and a possible future relationship with institutional capital.

1. What ITI Hotels really is

ITI Hotels traces its roots back to 1921, when Società Esercizi Alberghieri Affini was established in Rome and later evolved into Istituto Turistico Italiano. Its historic headquarters are located at Piazza Montecitorio 12, in the former Hotel Milano, which was converted between 1975 and 1976 into today’s Colonna Palace Hotel.

This Roman origin matters because it reveals the group’s initial nature: not a hotel chain built on management contracts, but an owner connected to valuable hospitality real estate.

The following decades gradually shifted the center of gravity toward Sardinia. There, the group built a portfolio of resorts, holiday villages and hotels in the island’s main tourist destinations, with a particular concentration in Costa Smeralda, Gallura and eastern Sardinia.

Today, the ITI brand is associated with an articulated presence: Rome, Sardinia and selected international destinations, including Antigua through the Colonna brand. But the heart of the analysis, for anyone looking at the group from a hotel investment perspective, is the Sardinian perimeter.

ITI Marina Hotels & Resorts, founded in 1978, currently states that it owns 38 hospitality properties in Sardinia. This is relevant not only because of the scale, but also because of the nature of the assets: properties in high-demand tourism locations, combining resorts, holiday villages, leisure hotels and presences in seaside destinations with strong appeal.

In the Italian market, where hotel ownership is often fragmented, undercapitalized or tied to individual family-owned assets, a portfolio of this kind represents an uncommon patrimonial platform.

2. Ownership, family and generational continuity

The ITI case is also a family business case.

Two names often recur in journalistic reconstructions: Corbeddu and Loi. Antonio Corbeddu was the builder-entrepreneur associated with the group’s historical development and with Sardinia’s tourism growth. The Loi brothers, originally from Orosei, are now the operating and ownership reference point for the ITI Marina perimeter.

Recent press coverage describes the Loi family as heirs to the entrepreneurial tradition started by Corbeddu. This point matters because it shifts the interpretation from family chronicle to governance: the issue is not only who owns the hotels, but how a large family-owned hotel portfolio navigates the transition between generations.

In the Italian hotel sector, succession is often the moment when three possible paths emerge:

1. full preservation of family control;

2. selective opening to operating or financial partners;

3. partial or total sale of assets.

In ITI’s case, public evidence so far points mainly to the first and second paths: preservation of ownership, strengthening of the Loi family’s role and selective openness to operators or financial institutions on specific projects.

Antonio Corbeddu’s passing in January 2026 therefore does not appear to represent an immediate operational discontinuity. But it is an important symbolic passage. It marks the end of the founder-entrepreneur phase and makes the long-term valorization of the portfolio an even more central issue.

3. Why ITI should not be read only through its financial statements

One of the most common mistakes in analyzing Italian family-owned hotel groups is to read their value exclusively through the revenue or profits of individual companies.

In ITI’s case, this approach risks being misleading.

The public information available shows companies with ordinary financial statements, revenues that are not comparable to those of major international hotel groups, and a structure spread across multiple entities. But no single financial statement, on its own, reflects the value of the portfolio.

The reason is simple: ITI is not an asset-light group. It is an asset-heavy group.

In an asset-light model, value lies in contracts, brands, management fees, distribution and the ability to scale quickly without owning real estate. In an asset-heavy model, by contrast, value is embedded in the assets: land, buildings, locations, permits, destinations and development potential.

ITI belongs to this second category.

The company does not merely manage third-party hotels. Historically, it has built, owned and operated a significant share of its own properties. This completely changes the valuation approach. An investor would not start only from a multiple of operating EBITDA. Instead, they would need to estimate the real estate value of the portfolio, asset by asset and destination by destination, taking into account location, maintenance condition, required capital expenditure, rate potential, seasonality, planning constraints and the alternative value of the asset.

In other words, the income statement describes current operations. The implicit balance sheet tells the deeper value story.

4. Sardinia as a hotel real estate platform

The heart of ITI’s value is Sardinia.

For a hotel investor, the island offers a rare combination of factors:

• international recognition;

• strong leisure demand potential;

• scarcity of prime locations;

• high landscape value;

• a hotel supply that is not always modern;

• opportunities to reposition historic assets;

• growing interest from institutional capital and specialized operators.

Costa Smeralda and Gallura, in particular, are markets with rigid supply. Truly comparable new locations are difficult to create. Scarcity generates value. And when a portfolio includes assets in areas of this kind, its value does not depend only on the operating results of the latest season.

It depends on the ability to hold non-replicable positions.

This is the difference between an ordinary hotel and a strategic tourism asset. The first is worth the cash flows it produces. The second is also worth the place it occupies.

With 38 owned properties in Sardinia, ITI Marina is therefore much more than a regional tourism operator. It is a hotel real estate platform distributed across high-intensity tourism destinations.

5. The acquisition of the Hotel Panorama in Cagliari

The acquisition of the Hotel Panorama in Cagliari is one of the most interesting signals of recent years.

The property, a historic hotel in the Sardinian capital, was acquired by ITI Marina for a figure reported by the press at around €8.3 million. It is a hotel with approximately one hundred rooms and an urban positioning that differs from the group’s seaside resorts.

This transaction deserves attention for three reasons.

The first is geographic. Cagliari is not Costa Smeralda. It is an urban, airport-connected, administrative, university, healthcare, business and leisure destination. Entering or strengthening a position in the capital means diversifying beyond the pure seasonality of seaside resorts.

The second is real estate-related. Acquiring a hotel to be relaunched is typical of an owner with a patrimonial vision. The value does not lie only in the purchase price, but in the ability to transform an underused asset into a hospitality product aligned with current demand.

The third is strategic. A group that already controls numerous properties in Sardinia can use Cagliari as an urban anchor, a gateway to the island and a complement to its leisure network.

The transaction shows that ITI Marina is not merely defending its existing portfolio. It continues to act as a regional real estate consolidator.

6. The agreement with Intesa Sanpaolo: the supply chain as value infrastructure

The second signal is the supply-chain agreement signed between Intesa Sanpaolo and ITI Marina Hotels & Resorts.

Formally, the initiative supports sustainable tourism and the local supply chain in Sardinia, with a focus on suppliers, strategic partners, agrifood, craftsmanship and local businesses.

But from a hotel investment perspective, the message is broader.

A hotel owner does not create value only within the walls of its hotels. It also creates value through its relationship with the territory: supplies, employment, local products, services, reputation, sustainability, continuity of banking relationships and the ability to generate economic spillover.

When a bank such as Intesa Sanpaolo builds a supply-chain agreement around ITI Marina, it implicitly recognizes the group as an anchor company: a player capable of organizing demand, suppliers and territory.

This is an important step. A hotel portfolio becomes stronger when it is not isolated. A hospitality asset embedded in a strong supply chain is less fragile than a hotel that lives only off its own seasonality. It has relationships, negotiating power, territorial identity and access to more structured financial tools.

For an investor, the supply chain is a form of invisible infrastructure. It does not always appear in the financial statements, but it affects the resilience of the asset.

7. Free Beach Costa Rei: ownership retained, management delegated

The third signal is the most relevant from an industrial perspective.

In March 2026, TH Resorts signed a long-term management agreement with ITI Marina Hotels for TH Free Beach Costa Rei, a historic holiday village with more than 400 rooms on Sardinia’s south-eastern coast.

The direction of the transaction is crucial: ITI Marina retains ownership of the asset, while management is entrusted to a specialized national operator.

This is not a minor choice. It is a transformation of the model.

For decades, many Italian family-owned hotel groups identified ownership and management as one and the same thing. Whoever owned the hotel operated it directly. Today, however, in more complex portfolios, the separation between PropCo and OpCo is becoming increasingly common.

The real estate remains with the patrimonial owner. The operator brings management, distribution, marketing, product expertise, organization, systems and commercial capacity.

In the Free Beach case, this logic is even clearer because the asset is a large holiday village, with a different level of operating complexity from a traditional hotel. Delegating management to TH Resorts allows the owner to retain the real estate value while entrusting operations to a structured leisure group.

The presence of CDP Equity among the shareholders of TH Resorts adds another layer of interpretation: through the operating management, a company also backed by institutional capital enters the valorization process of an ITI real estate asset. This is not an investment in ITI Marina’s capital, nor should it be read as such. But it is still an important industrial precedent.

It is the type of relationship that may anticipate more evolved forms of collaboration between large family owners, specialized operators and institutional capital.

8. The Costa Smeralda benchmark: what the Qatar model teaches

To understand why the separation between ownership and management is not a retreat, but often a strategy, one only has to look at what is happening at the top end of Costa Smeralda.

Smeralda Holding, controlled by Qatari capital, owns some of the destination’s most iconic assets: Cala di Volpe, Romazzino, Pitrizza, Cervo, Marina di Porto Cervo, Pevero Golf Club and a large real estate and land portfolio.

The model is clear: real estate ownership remains firmly in the hands of the patrimonial owner, while the management or positioning of selected hotels is entrusted to top international brands. The agreement with LVMH for Belmond and Cheval Blanc fits perfectly into this logic.

This benchmark is useful for reading ITI, despite all differences in scale, segment and positioning.

The point is not to claim that ITI and Smeralda Holding are comparable in product or asset value per key. They are not. The point is to recognize a shared logic: in scarce tourism markets, those who own the best real estate tend to retain the real estate and use operators to maximize operational value.

Ownership is the rare component. Management is the optimizable component.

Free Beach Costa Rei, from this perspective, is a coherent signal: ITI Marina is not selling the asset, but entrusting its operations to a specialized operator. It is a move from owner-operator to owner-platform.

9. The M&A reading: why ITI is a case study

ITI Hotels and ITI Marina embody one of the most interesting categories in Italian hospitality: the asset-rich family-owned group.

These are businesses that often do not appear in major international reports because they are not listed, do not have easily readable consolidated financial statements and communicate little from a financial perspective. Yet they control real estate portfolios that, in some cases, could be of interest to funds, family offices, leisure operators, hotel companies and real estate platforms.

In ITI’s case, the factors of interest are clear:

• presence in high-attraction destinations;

• direct ownership of numerous properties;

• a portfolio that is difficult to replicate;

• deep territorial roots;

• historic brands;

• selective repositioning potential;

• recent openness to operating partnerships;

• an ongoing generational transition.

At the same time, there are significant obstacles.

The first is information opacity. The group is structured across multiple companies and, at least publicly, there is no simple consolidated snapshot. For an investor, this means a long, complex and costly due diligence process.

The second is the family nature of the ownership. Sardinian hotel ownership often carries a strong identity-based connection with the territory. This makes rapid, purely financial transactions less likely and gradual paths more plausible: management agreements, partnerships, financing arrangements, minority investments, single-asset deals or dedicated vehicles.

The third is planning and regulatory complexity. Italian hotels, especially in valuable locations, are subject to constraints, permitted uses, authorizations and limits on conversion. These factors can reduce certain speculative options, while at the same time protecting the hospitality use value.

The fourth is the need for capital expenditure. A large portfolio requires maintenance, renovations, energy efficiency upgrades, product updates and continuous investment. In premium markets, perceived quality evolves quickly. Owning the asset is not enough: the product must remain competitive.

It is precisely this mix of value and complexity that makes ITI a case study.

10. Possible scenarios

In the absence of any public indication of extraordinary transactions, every scenario must be read as industrial analysis, not as a forecast.

The first scenario is that of the long-term owner-aggregator. The Loi family continues to retain control of the assets, selectively acquires new properties, uses banking leverage, delegates the management of some complex formats and strengthens its role as a hotel landlord in Sardinia. This is the scenario most consistent with recent moves.

The second scenario is selective openness to institutional or industrial partners. Not necessarily through a sale of the group, but through agreements on individual assets, joint ventures, real estate vehicles, management contracts or possible minority investments. In this case, ITI would remain owner or co-owner, while transforming part of the portfolio into a more capital-readable platform.

The third scenario is progressive valorization by cluster. Some assets could remain directly managed; others could be entrusted to specialized operators; others could be renovated, repositioned or included in partnerships. This is probably the most realistic scenario for a group with a large and heterogeneous portfolio.

The least likely scenario, based on publicly available information, is a rapid full sale. Not only because there are no signals in that direction, but also because the family, territorial and patrimonial logic of the group appears more oriented toward continuity than toward liquidation of the portfolio.

11. What ITI teaches hotel investors

The ITI case offers at least five useful lessons.

The first: in tourism, real estate still matters. In an era dominated by brands, platforms, management contracts and digital distribution, owning assets in scarce destinations remains one of the most solid forms of value creation.

The second: not all hotel groups should be valued in the same way. An asset-light operator is valued on fees, growth, contracts and margins. An asset-heavy group is valued on real estate, locations, capital expenditure, destinations and valorization potential.

The third: family governance is decisive. It can be a limitation if it produces opacity, slowness and lack of professionalization. But it can also be an advantage if it provides a long-term horizon, patient capital and deep knowledge of the territory.

The fourth: the separation between ownership and management is a trend that is likely to grow. The owner retains the asset; the operator maximizes performance; capital finances development. This formula is increasingly common in mature hotel markets.

The fifth: Sardinia remains one of the most interesting platforms for hospitality investment in the Mediterranean. Not for every asset, not in every location and not at any price. But in the right segments, with well-positioned properties and products that can be upgraded, the potential remains substantial.

Conclusion

ITI Hotels and ITI Marina are not just a Sardinian hotel group. They are a hospitality real estate portfolio built over time.

Their value does not lie solely in the revenues of individual companies, the number of rooms or the visibility of the Colonna brand. It lies in the combination of ownership, destination, scarcity, family history and transformation potential.

The end of Antonio Corbeddu’s entrepreneurial cycle and the growing centrality of the Loi family place the group in an interesting phase: not a rupture, but a transition. Recent moves suggest a pragmatic direction: maintain control of the assets, strengthen financial relationships, selectively open to specialized operators and continue to preside over the territory.

For hotel investors, ITI is a dossier worth studying not because it is officially on the market — it is not, based on public information — but because it represents one of the most typical and least understood forms of Italian hotel value: large family-owned portfolios, located in strong destinations, difficult to read from the outside and potentially transformable into modern platforms.

In hospitality, value does not always sit where it first appears. Sometimes it is not in the brand, not in the revenue, not in current operations. It is in the underlying asset.

And in ITI’s case, the underlying asset is hotel real estate in one of the most desirable tourism regions in the Mediterranean.

Group profile

FAQ

What is ITI Hotels?

ITI Hotels is an Italian hotel group historically founded in Rome in 1921 and later developed mainly in Sardinia, with owned hospitality properties and brands linked to the Colonna tradition.

What is ITI Marina Hotels & Resorts?

ITI Marina Hotels & Resorts is the group’s Sardinian perimeter, established in 1978 and composed of 38 owned hospitality properties across the island’s main tourist destinations.

Why is ITI interesting for hotel investors?

Because it represents an asset-heavy model: value does not depend only on hotel management, but above all on the underlying real estate portfolio, located in highly attractive tourism destinations.

Is ITI Hotels for sale?

There is no public source indicating any intention to sell the group or the portfolio. This analysis concerns the industrial and real estate value of the ITI case, not a forecast of any extraordinary transaction.

Why is the agreement with TH Resorts important?

Because it shows a possible evolution of the model: ITI Marina retains ownership of the Free Beach Costa Rei asset, while management is entrusted to a specialized operator. This reflects a separation between real estate ownership and hotel operations.

What is the main risk of the ITI model?

The main risk is complexity: seasonality, capital expenditure needs, corporate fragmentation, information opacity and the need to continuously update the hotel product.

What is the main strength of the ITI model?

Its main strength is the ownership of hospitality assets in scarce and difficult-to-replicate destinations, especially in Sardinia.

Methodological note and sources

This analysis is based on public sources: the official websites of ITI Hotels and ITI Marina Hotels & Resorts; press articles and releases concerning the passing of Antonio Corbeddu; the Intesa Sanpaolo release on the supply-chain agreement with ITI Marina; news about the acquisition of the Hotel Panorama in Cagliari; releases and articles on the TH Resorts-Free Beach Costa Rei agreement; public sources on Smeralda Holding, Qatar Investment Authority and management agreements with LVMH; and public information on the shareholding structure of TH Resorts.

The forward-looking assessments contained in this article are the author’s analysis. They do not reflect confidential information, ongoing negotiations or declared intentions by the parties.

Roberto Necci - r.necci@robertonecci.it 

Contact us at info@investimentialberghieri.it