Vittorio Gargiulo Hotiday Founder is a story that starts with a simple, stubborn statistic: in Italy, roughly 30% of hotel rooms go unsold every season. Most people in hospitality treat that as background noise. Gargiulo treated it as a business.
Today he’s CEO and co-founder of Hotiday, a Milan-based traveltech startup that has raised more than $6 million and just topped Sifted’s ranking of the fastest-growing startups in Southern Europe — with a two-year revenue growth rate north of 1,300%.
The Problem: An Industry Built to Waste Inventory
Hotels operate on a brutal margin logic. A room that goes unsold on a given night isn’t just lost revenue — it’s a cost that never gets recovered, because unlike a product on a shelf, a hotel room can’t be sold “tomorrow instead.” Independent and mid-sized hotels, in particular, often lack the pricing technology and distribution reach that big chains use to keep occupancy high. The result is a structural inefficiency that’s been baked into the hospitality industry for decades: rooms sitting empty while hotels quietly absorb the loss.
That inefficiency is exactly what Gargiulo and his co-founders — Federico Di Carlo and Federico Brunelli — set out to fix.
How Hotiday Works
Hotiday’s model is built on what the founders call “instant buying.” Rather than simply listing a hotel’s spare inventory the way a traditional booking platform would, Hotiday acquires blocks of rooms directly from partner hotels, paying for them in advance. It then resells those rooms online under its own consumer-facing brand, Hotiday Hotels — effectively creating what the company describes as the first decentralized, data-driven hotel chain, with rooms embedded inside existing partner properties rather than in buildings Hotiday owns itself.
The acquisition process runs through a proprietary algorithm. A hotel submits details about the property — location, room count, distance to the coast, star rating, guest reviews — and the algorithm calculates an instant monetary offer based on that room’s estimated occupancy and revenue potential. If the hotel accepts, the rooms go live on Hotiday’s platform within roughly three weeks, enhanced with digital concierge services and other add-ons aimed at travelers who expect a more modern booking experience than a typical listing offers.
The traction has been real. Hotiday has grown from a handful of properties in 2022 to more than 65 hospitality partners — including established groups like TH Resorts — spanning over 90 destinations across Italy, Spain, France, Greece, and Portugal. The company posted 500% revenue growth in a single year and opened its first international Room Collection in Paris, according to its 2025 funding announcement. Internally, the team has described the company’s growth as roughly 4x year-over-year heading into 2026 — momentum that helped Hotiday earn a spot in Endeavor’s Elevator 2025 program, a selective six-month mentorship track for high-potential Italian founders.
Founder Background: From Revenue Management to Running the Business
Before Hotiday, Gargiulo worked as a revenue manager inside the hospitality industry in Italy — the exact seat where the unsold-room problem is felt most acutely, night after night, property after property. He holds a Master’s Degree in Finance from Bocconi University in Milan, where he met his future co-founders while all three were studying finance together.
The idea for Hotiday didn’t come from a whiteboard exercise. It came from studying Casavo, a well-known Italian real estate startup built around an “instant buying” model for homes, and asking whether the same financial logic — buy the asset directly, take on the inventory risk, resell it with better technology and service — could work for hotel rooms instead of houses. It was a natural fit for the three founders: Gargiulo and Brunelli both had direct hospitality experience, while Di Carlo came from a family background in hotel management.
Hotiday launched out of Bocconi’s own B4i (Bocconi for Innovation) accelerator program in January 2022, closing a €500,000 pre-seed round backed by Bonsai Ventures, B4i itself, Moonstone Venture Capital, and Investinit, along with angel investors including a former Booking Holdings executive. Three years later, in May 2025, the company closed a €5.5 million round led by Italian VC firm P101 SGR, bringing total funding to roughly $6 million. Gargiulo described the milestone as confirmation the company was building something without precedent in the hospitality industry — and a signal to think even bigger.
That bigger thinking now shows up in the numbers. Hotiday’s placement atop Sifted’s 2026 Southern Europe ranking — built from a two-year revenue compound annual growth rate — puts Vittorio Gargiulo Hotiday Founder in rare company among Milan’s fastest-scaling startups, ahead of well-funded competitors in legal AI and B2B software. For more on how Gargiulo has approached the day-to-day realities of building Hotiday, his 2024 interview with scaleupitaly covers the team’s early hiring challenges and product-market fit process in his own words.
Key Takeaways
- Solve a structural problem, not a preference. Hotiday didn’t build a nicer booking app — it targeted the specific financial mechanic (unsold inventory) that hurts hotels every single night.
- Domain experience is a moat. All three co-founders came from hospitality or finance backgrounds directly relevant to the problem, which shaped a business model outsiders wouldn’t have arrived at as quickly.
- Borrow proven models from adjacent industries. The instant-buying mechanic wasn’t invented from scratch — it was adapted from Casavo’s real estate playbook and applied to a new asset class.
- Growth compounds when the model scales geographically. Hotiday’s expansion from Italy into Spain, France, Greece, and Portugal — without owning a single building — is what pushed its revenue CAGR to the top of Sifted’s regional rankings.
FAQ
Q1. Who is Vittorio Gargiulo? Vittorio Gargiulo is the CEO and co-founder of Hotiday, a Milan-based traveltech startup. He previously worked as a revenue manager in the hospitality industry and holds a Master’s Degree in Finance from Bocconi University.
Q2. What is Hotiday and how does it work? Hotiday is a traveltech startup that acquires unsold hotel rooms in advance using a proprietary pricing algorithm, then resells them online under its own brand, Hotiday Hotels — creating what the company calls a decentralized, data-driven hotel chain.
Q3. How much funding has Hotiday raised? Hotiday has raised roughly $6 million (about €6 million) across two rounds: a €500,000 pre-seed round in January 2022 and a €5.5 million round led by P101 SGR in May 2025.
Q4. Why is Hotiday getting attention in 2026? Hotiday ranked #1 on Sifted’s 2026 Southern Europe 100 leaderboard, posting a two-year revenue compound annual growth rate of over 1,300% — the highest of any company on the list — and was selected for Endeavor’s Elevator 2025 program.
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