2. Sardinia: Destination and Territorial Profile
Tourism Economy and Accommodation Infrastructure
Tourism is a significant part of Sardinia’s service economy. Its effects extend beyond hotels, resorts and holiday rentals to restaurants, transport, food supply, retail, cultural activity, guiding, recreation, construction, maintenance, events and a wide range of small and medium-sized enterprises.
At the end of 2024, the accommodation and food-service sectors in Sardinia comprised 13,731 active enterprises and almost 70,000 workers. The sector represented approximately 10% of the regional business base, while employment increased by 4% over the preceding year. These figures demonstrate the economic importance of tourism-related activity, though they should not be interpreted as a complete measure of tourism’s contribution to regional gross value added or of the total number of jobs dependent on visitor expenditure.[sardegnaimpresa]
The accommodation sector is diverse. It includes hotels and similar establishments, campsites and holiday villages, agritourism, bed-and-breakfast accommodation, guesthouses, short-stay rentals and other forms of private accommodation. The regional Tourism Observatory publishes annual and monthly data on establishments, beds and rooms, disaggregated by province, accommodation category and type.[osservatorio.sardegnaturismo][osservatorio.sardegnaturismo]
This diversity creates opportunities for different forms of visitor experience and local enterprise. It also creates important management questions.
Accommodation capacity shapes where visitor demand is located, how seasonal peaks are distributed, which water and waste systems face pressure, how much land is used for tourism, and how far tourism value is retained within local communities. A high concentration of beds in a water-stressed coastal locality may have different implications from dispersed small-scale accommodation in an inland area, even where total annual visitor nights are comparable.
The rapid growth of private and occasional accommodation is especially relevant. In 2024, the “other private accommodation” category recorded approximately 600,000 arrivals and 3.3 million overnight stays, with overnight stays increasing by 42% compared with 2023. This category includes accommodation that may have become more visible through strengthened registration and identification processes. The growth should therefore be interpreted as a combination of recorded market expansion and improved formalisation, rather than automatically as a like-for-like increase in all types of tourism demand.[sardegnaimpresa]
This development has destination-management implications:
| Issue | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Data coverage | Authorities need reliable, comparable information on where accommodation supply and visitor nights are located |
| Water and wastewater | Dispersed or seasonal accommodation can increase peak demand in areas with limited infrastructure capacity |
| Waste and circularity | Visitor-related waste generation may rise faster than collection and treatment systems can adapt |
| Housing and local access | The relationship between short-term accommodation, long-term housing availability and workforce needs should be monitored locally |
| Land use | New accommodation development can affect landscapes, coastal systems and habitat connectivity |
| Local value retention | The economic contribution of accommodation depends on local procurement, employment, ownership and supply-chain linkages |
| Regulation and standards | Registration, safety, energy, water-efficiency and waste-management requirements can support better destination intelligence and performance |
The size of Sardinia’s visitor economy creates a substantial opportunity to support local livelihoods and investment. It also creates a responsibility to ensure that accommodation growth is compatible with resource availability, local housing needs, public-service capacity and the environmental characteristics of individual destinations.
For this reason, the paper treats accommodation not simply as a supply-side tourism statistic. It is a key interface between visitor demand and territorial systems: water, energy, waste, mobility, land use, employment, housing, community value and ecological resilience.