Here we are at the last appointment dedicated to the FAITA-Federcamping webinar in which 4 university researches were presented and in which MIBACT (the Culture and Tourism Ministry) and ENIT (the Nacional Agency for Tourism) also took part. The planned intervention by Flaminia Santarelli, MIBACT Tourism General Manager, was reduced to a simple declaration due to connection problems (!). The director of the ministry was only able to use a cellphone on speakerphone and even so some of her words were lost. “I wanted to make a presence at this meeting today, even if quick, to fully agree with Maurizio Vianello on the advisability of setting up a work together soon,” she said. In Rimini Santarelli had already recognized the need to set up a “laboratory” on outdoor tourism together. “Then due to my difficulty, we were unable to set it up“, he confessed, “but the commitment on the part of MIBACT is there, because this is a sector certainly with interesting prospects for post-Covid tourism and on which we must begin to work right away. I wanted to reaffirm commitment and will on the part of the ministry and I agree with Vianello: we will arrange shortly, even before the holidays, a meeting that is a basis for joint work”.
ENIT: inconsistent initiatives
Giovanni Bastianelli, executive director of ENIT, also spoke before the close of the morning. “If I have to express a personal opinion, there is this disproportion between the innovation that has existed within the category and the association compared to the importance that is given to this sector,” he declared. “The numbers that were given before are very large, but above all in our everyday life we understand how important outdoor tourism is. There is a long way to go with regards to the quality of the facilities and destinations, but in fact there has always been very little consideration for this type of tourism“.
The director then pitted a series of data on tourism in general and on the enormous difficulties faced this year. He spoke of long-haul tourism, which is very marginal for open-air accommodations, and how the flight market has collapsed. He then added that those who do not take environmental sustainability into account are out of business, because this concept is now central. In his opinion, areas and categories that ignore this aspect will be cut out.
ENIT now has the declared objective of restarting the internal market, as well as working on nearby foreign markets. However, the recipe chosen to reach them does not seem totally coherent, having cited as an example of the work done in recent months a series of webinars dedicated to foreign markets, and in particular to the US one, working in close contact with tour operators and major airlines. Among other initiatives, there will be a virtual exhibition on the 100 years of history of the National Tourism Agency, while in recent months there has been participation in the film festivals of Venice and Rome where films have been awarded that have shown how much it is nice to travel to Italy.
Vianello: we must consider 2020 as “year zero”
Maurizio Vianello (in the opening picture) had no choice but to close the event. “The open-air tourism supply chain could help to recover from a social point of view, employment, income distribution and create new wealth, if allowed to be activated,” he said. “We need to develop a strategy based on criteria and specializations, personalizing the answers according to the different segmentations that have materialized on the market. We discovered that local tourism will become topical again, but it should be read as a European market, not the neighboring province: we must create the conditions for tourists who move within a radius of a 1,000 kilometers to reach us”.
Then the FAITA-Federcamping president hinted at a possible collaboration. “At ENIT we propose as a hypothesis to think of a communication campaign and images that support the Italy brand, but also highlight the destinations based on campsites. We must activate collaboration with institutions to convince the Italian system – consumers and administrations – to give adequate importance to our sector. We need to strengthen the image of our resilience capacity. We have passed 2020, with damage and losses, but we are still on the market, resistant, and we are working towards 2021 trying to develop medium and long-term strategies: getting closer to the sustainable economy, implementing digitization in our companies to dialogue with the individual customer in a personalized way. Sometimes we exaggerate in the belief that we know what he wants, but we could have some surprises”.
For Vianello the problem is twofold: it is necessary to create consensus around the sector by modifying the tourist’s convictions and it is necessary to document the problems to politicians, also offering hypotheses for solutions, to overcome the trickle of meetings and reminders that rarely materialize. “We will develop together the new means that we have learned to use this year, creating opportunities for meeting and exchanging views, so that as many interpretations can be developed in our 2,600 structures,” he added. “Single-issue solutions are not needed: each of us must adapt to the needs of the market. New entrepreneurs are needed, and this is an epochal challenge. If we do not take this opportunity, the number of campsites in Italy cannot grow”.
The president reserved the last words of his speech to the need to find technical and economic solutions to support the sector. “We need to interact with the public administrators to understand our needs,” he concluded. “We must have certainties, not concession deadlines, subjective interpretations about the land registry, years of waiting before the municipal technical offices grant authorizations. Covid has shown that we must move fast: if we have an answer in 5 years, the situations will have changed radically. We would prefer to have an investment capacity supported by new models of financial amortization, rather than following the welfare logics that have so far materialized. We believe that to make this type of reasoning we can start from 2020 as year zero“.
The other parts of this story
- FAITA-Federcamping: together with 4 universities they paint the picture of the Italian sector
- La Sapienza for FAITA: here are all the numbers of the Italian outdoor tourism sector
- The evolutionary models of the Italian open-air sector in Ca’ Foscari’s research for FAITA
- FAITA-Federcamping: University of Teramo addresses the issue of regulatory obstacles
ADAC Camping radically simplifies discount system ADAC Campcard