The open-air facilities in the Italian region Trentino are a fundamental asset of the province’s tourist offer: their positioning is very good but, especially in relation to neighboring areas, there is room for improvement in which to invest. This is the message that emerges from the study “The open-air offer in Trentino” promoted by FAITA Trentino, part of Confcommercio Trentino, in collaboration with Thrends Tourism & Hospitality Analytics and Mediocredito Trentino – Alto Adige.
“We wanted to question ourselves and we asked ourselves what we could do for our members”, says Fabio Poletti, president of FAITA Trentino. “We have entrusted the task of a specialized company to photograph open-air tourism in our province and compare it with our neighbors, who have a similar offer. The study highlights some critical issues but also many positive sides. We must be honest if we want this photograph to be a stimulus to our category. On one aspect, we have already prepared a series of interventions related to training because we believe that it represents a fundamental value in the provision of our services”.
The study therefore photographed the situation of open-air tourism in Trentino, highlighting in particular the attractiveness of the offer in relation to the new needs of tourists resulting from the pandemic: nature, open spaces, quality services, safety. All aspects that open-air tourism can offer its customers.
“The study highlights some central points: the main one is that our sector is dynamic and growing, and it is positioning itself on the market in a new and different way compared to the common perception, also intercepting new groups of customers”, underlines the national president of FAITA-FederCamping Alberto Granzotto “Credit to FAITA Trentino for having conducted this survey: a tool that we will also replicate at national level in the coming months”.
Non-hospitality: the most resilient sector
The study also offers a broad picture of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on tourism, highlighting how the open-air one, therefore also linked to campsites, has faced the crisis well, especially when compared to the hotel sector.
During the decade preceding Covid-19, international demand for Italy marked a very solid growth trend, so much that the composition of the market went from a national majority to a predominantly international one (51%). In 2019 the country marked the record of 437 million visitors in officially traced accommodation facilities, for a total of over 500 million visitors.
In 2020, this volume was reduced by 52 percent. The decline in national demand was much more limited (-34%) than the international one (-70%) for obvious reasons linked to mobility between states. The data stops last year because, at the time of the drafting of the dossier, the 2021 one was not yet available, especially in disaggregated form, useful for the analyzes and comparisons presented.
In the context of a generalized and very consistent decline in 2020, the most resilient forms of accommodation were non-hotel ones. There was, therefore, a better holding of the national segment for the non-hotel sector, which is made up of presences mainly in the tourist residential (professional), in campsites and camping villages. The research estimates, in the absence of final data, that in 2021 the non-hotel accommodation in Italy will register (summer vs summer) a limited decline between 10 and 18 percent on 2018 volumes, a less drastic reduction than in 2020 and linked above all to the low volumes of June.
Going into the merits of Italian campsites, the research shows how between 2015 and 2019 the growth in attendance has grown, especially in terms of foreign tourists (+11.1%) compared to national ones (+3.1%). In 2020 there was a setback due to the most acute phase of the Covid-19 epidemic: a 63% drop in the foreign market and 25% in the Italian one.
Camping: the best performances
If we compare the trend in presences in the 2019 and 2020 seasons in the camping segment, compared to the hotel sector, we see that the decline was less marked for campsites. As far as Italian tourists are concerned, we are talking about 25% against 39%. The foreign market has greatly reduced (-63%) to 12 million, when in 2019 alone it was worth 33 million, or almost 50% of the total attendance at Italian campsites.
It is interesting to note that it is the non-hotel categories, that is agritourism and camping sites, which increase their share of the total Italian presences in 2020. The campsites which, between 2015 and 2019, had an average share of 15.8%, passed into the 2020 at 18 percent. Certainly, elements such as product diversification, the union with nature, greater quality services, the explosion of wellness are factors that could lead to confirm this weight of the camping sector.
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