Leonardo Hotels rebuilds its development team to absorb 28 new hotels in 2026

Leonardo Hotels Central Europe expects to add 28 new hotels to its portfolio in 2026 alone, according to Leonardo Hotels. That figure includes around 20 properties acquired from the former Revo portfolio.

The group's response, set out in a company press release dated 5 August 2026 in Berlin, is a rebuilt development department: a larger team, new regional leads and clearly split responsibilities. Leonardo says plainly that the above-average project volume forced the change. For hotel owners, asset managers and investors across Europe, the new structure works as a guide to who is buying where, and what kind of property they want.

Close to 60 projects on one desk

Most of the workload comes after the paperwork. According to the company, many of the deals closed this year will bring integration, reconstruction or renovation work over the coming months. On top of that, the development team is still overseeing some 30 projects from earlier years, mostly conversions and renovations of existing buildings. Several new-build projects are at an advanced stage and due to launch next year.

The queue won't shrink, either. Leonardo expects to make around 20 more acquisitions in 2027. The company calls the volume of parallel work one of the major reasons for the reorganization. That suggests it now sees managing projects after a deal closes as a constraint on growth equal to finding the deals in the first place.

The group has run parallel work before, just on a smaller scale. Its October 2025 update, carried by Hospitality Net, listed new openings in Mainz and at the Hannover Medical Park with extensive renovations still under way in both. It also described a programme to fully update around 1,000 rooms and bathrooms across existing hotels by the end of 2025. A refurbishment programme inside hotels the group already runs is one kind of job. Absorbing 28 new properties while some 30 older projects stay open puts a much heavier coordination load on the same desk.

That matters to anyone selling to the group or working on its buildings. A development team running dozens of live integrations has to sequence them, and clear regional ownership is the basic tool for that. For contractors and owners already in Leonardo's pipeline, the practical change is that each territory now has a named person in charge.

Who now owns which territory

The new structure gives each part of the map an owner. Leonardo's release and Passport News, which reported the full set of appointments, describe this split:

• Martin Stegner joins as Development Director and Deputy VP for Development. He takes charge of Central Europe, and part of his focus is expanding the Master serviced apartment brand.
• Robert Ruschke, on the development team since 2021, becomes Deputy Development Director Central Europe. He covers the wider region with a focus on Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Eastern Europe.
• Björn Anker Gullaksen joins as Director of Development for the Nordics, giving Scandinavia a named director to drive expansion in Northern Europe.
• Niccolò Pravettoni becomes Business Development Manager for Italy. He was most recently Head of Business Development at Líbere Hospitality Group.
• In France, Leonardo is still looking for a development manager to scale up its activities.
• In Czechia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, the plan is to recruit a locally based manager in each destination.

Taken together, the split pairs senior oversight of the core with specialists at the edges. Ruschke is an internal appointment, so someone with about five years on the team now looks after the core German-speaking markets. The outside hires cover places where Leonardo is small or not yet present.

The Italy brief stands out for its counterparties. Pravettoni's job is to work with owners, asset managers and institutional investors, which tells an Italian asset manager with a city or resort hotel that Leonardo plans to grow there through partnerships with the people who own the property. He will focus on major cities, selected secondary locations and key leisure destinations, so this is not a city-only brief. The Master serviced apartment line in Stegner's remit matters for a similar reason: the group already counts master apartment buildings in both Italy and Poland, so extended-stay product is part of the expansion alongside hotels.

Germany first, then the capitals of the north

The initial geographic focus is the core market. The Leonardo Hotels Central Europe business unit has more than 130 hotels, and around 80 of them are in Germany, with more German hotels due to be added by the end of the year. Outside Germany the footprints are much smaller, which is where the new hires come in.

The Nordic brief is the most specific. Gullaksen is focused on the capital cities, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki and Reykjavik, and Leonardo will look at both acquisitions and leases there. Scandinavia was already on the group's long-term list in October 2025, alongside Serbia and Croatia. Hiring a director for the region turns that intention into a staffed territory.

The Nordic entry is the clearest example of how the team plans to grow without adding to the renovation backlog. Leonardo says it is most interested in existing hotels that can be integrated relatively quickly into one of its seven brands, whether bought or leased. Converting an operating hotel to an existing brand could add rooms with less build-out work than a new build or major conversion, though the company hasn't set out what makes a property quick to integrate.

Leonardo's own record has a close precedent. In July 2025 the group took over the former Radisson Blu in Erfurt, and the hotel kept operating as normal as NYX Hotel Erfurt while the updating went on. The NYX Hotel Berlin Köpenick, which opened two months earlier, shows the other route: it opened only after a comprehensive renovation programme. The Nordic preference describes the Erfurt approach, where the hotel keeps trading while the work happens.

Rebranding at scale is also familiar ground. A Times of Israel travel blog described the Fattal Hotel Group retiring the Jurys Inn name in favour of its Leonardo brand. One example was the Galway hotel, which reopened after 30 years as a Jurys Inn with extensive renovations and 130 refurbished bedrooms.

Central and Eastern Europe works differently. Leonardo sees further potential in Czechia, Romania and Hungary, and in Poland, where it has grown to four hotels and a master apartment building, and it wants to pursue countries such as Slovakia and Slovenia too. Planning a locally based manager for each destination suggests the group sees on-the-ground presence as the way to find deals in markets of this size.

France has the most staged plan. Once the French portfolio reaches a second property later this year, the aim is to add more hotels in Paris and other cities. The October 2025 outlook named Paris, Marseille and Lyon as target cities, so the vacant development manager post is the piece that would turn that list into a working pipeline.

There's a fair objection to reading all this as integration management. Most of the named hires sit on the expansion side, opening the Nordics, Italy, France and a string of Central and Eastern European markets, and Leonardo describes the workload as one of the major reasons for the change, not the only one. Both readings hold. The structure divides an expanding map into territories one person can actually manage, and the stated buying preferences point toward deals that close fast and integrate easily.

A bigger fund and a longer shopping list

Partnership IV is supporting the expansion of the hotel portfolio with additional investment capital, and its total volume is expected to be between €800 million and €1 billion. Leonardo says that money will fund growth in established markets as well as expansion into new destinations. The 2025 materials give a baseline. Partnership III started in January 2024 with €419 million and had grown to €542 million by January 2025, with almost €159 million of that contributed by Fattal Properties (Europe). Since it began, Leonardo has bought 30 hotels in the Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom for almost €740 million in total.

For sellers, the earlier fund offers a rough sense of scale. Divide Partnership III's spend by its hotel count and the average comes to roughly €25 million a hotel. That figure mixes very different markets and hotel types, so treat it as a rough guide only.

The stated criteria are broad: well-positioned city hotels, including business and conference properties, plus leisure assets, through new builds, conversions, existing hotels and turnkey projects. The release also counts properties that offer room to develop established concepts and brands further, and it treats leisure growth as a goal running alongside the city push. The 2025 outlook had already named Germany, Italy, Croatia and France as leisure investment destinations.

Yoram Biton, Managing Director of Leonardo Hotels Central Europe, described 2025 as a year of "growth, renovations and new partnerships" and called the company "a dependable partner for investors, municipal authorities and project developers." The 2026 reorganization is the operational test of that pitch. With 28 additions and some 30 older projects running at once, being dependable comes down to delivering each project on schedule.

The nearest checkpoints arrive before the year ends. If the Revo integrations, the extra German openings and the second French property land on schedule while the 2027 deals start to arrive, that would suggest the reorganization has done its job.