Tourism recovery in Italy: what future after the summer?

The report highlights areas that can be leveraged to unlock the untapped potential of the Italian tourism sector and enhance its centrality to the national economy, responding to global demand that is increasingly digital, focused on sustainability, and aware of the impacts of climate change.

Read the report’s key messages and download the document for further information.

• An initial evaluation of the recently concluded summer season reveals a dual-speed performance in the Italian tourism sector: a surge in foreign tourist arrivals, but domestic figures fell short of expectations.
• The primary reason for that result is economic, as many Italian tourists favoured less expensive foreign destinations.
• Consequently, foreign visitors are increasingly the driving force of the Italian summer tourist season.
• To continue attracting these international visitors, the Italian sector must respond to three global trends:
  • tourists in the next decade will primarily come from Asia and will be looking for experiences, especially luxury ones;
  • holidays as a whole will become even more sustainable and digitalised, prompting operators to compete on green services and increasingly personalised offers, analysing data generated by the tourist during their travel experience.
  • preferences will shift towards less popular destinations, potentially rebalancing the gap between northern and southern Europe, with the latter increasingly feeling the effects of global warming.
• Despite Italy's near unparalleled global appeal, it does fall short on some of the identified trends:
  • the fragmentation of the national tourism offering, with fewer luxury hotels and hotel chains compared to the European average, holds back Italy’s ability to accommodate rising tourist flows;
  • the Italian tourism industry struggles to train people ready to deal with new growth trends in experiential and sustainable tourism, and to offer the necessary reskilling pathways to adapt the sector to the demands of the digital transition;
  • Italian tourism is the most vulnerable to the climate crisis in Europe, with half of the annual visitor stays occurring in the summer and a quarter concentrated in just three provinces.
• Considering these trends and their challenges, a combination of measures is needed to guide the sector towards:
  • helping operators to scale up through increased access to venture capital and more flexible hotel management models;
  • reducing the gap between labour supply and demand, including through improved training programmes;
  • developing secondary tourist destinations and types through more effective branding and online promotion.