The Importance Of Tourism In Italy

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Reasons we need to concern ourselves with tourism in Italy
Annamaria Testa
A kind way to describe tourist promotion in Italy is ‘embarrassing’. ‘Despairing’ if one wants to be realistic. However, changes are supposed to happen lately: the National Associated Press Agency (ANSA) wrote an hopeful headline regarding the new National Tourist Agency (Enit) board of directors: “Italian tourism at a turning point”. It is to be hoped that substantial changes will come soon, although, as my grandma would say, “more haste, less speed” still holds.
Let us look at some facts to contextualize the problem . With eleven hundred thirty-three million travellers, the recent years have seen the greatest global tourist expansion of all times: in 2014, tourism …show more content…

We are now fifth in the world’s most visited countries top ten list after France, USA, Spain and China, and before Turkey. It seems we should be glad of it, but that is not entirely true.
Nowadays, tourism industry in Italy is growing, but less than in other countries - if other country’s growth is greater than ours is, it means we lag behind. During the ‘50es, almost one tourist out of five used to come to Italy and we were the most visited country in the world. Now, only one tourist out of 23 travels to Italy. During the ‘50es, Spain did not even appear in the most visited group. Now, Spain is the first tourist destination in Europe and the third in the world. There is something that Spain understood and did that we did not.
In addition to a growth in numbers, tourism industry is one of the economic sectors that grows the most. There are two charts to take into consideration: the first concerns the incoming tourist amount, the second one the amount of money they spend in the country (this is the one that really interests us). In the latter chart, Spain is in world’s second place after the USA and we go down to the sixth …show more content…

Those are the classic marketing four “p” (product, price, place, and promotion), an interpretive model created in the late sixties. I am afraid it is still unknown to some of the tourist industry national protagonists. Some countries attract tons of tourists with rock-bottom prices . In the competitive price index, which compares tourist attractions and tourist packages in 144 countries, Mexico is in 55th place, Spain 105th and Italy 133rd. Italy has high labour costs, but declaring a price war on Mexico and Spain to compete with them is not a realistic option. Moreover, a low-cost mass tourism model isn’t quite compatible with our territory.
Well, excluding price war, there are three levers left. Let’s start with place - meaning both the location where one gets to know and buys the travel-product and the place to reach to “consume” the

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