ALL ROUND
of Beppe Tassone

Where is tourism going in Italy? Which choices has it made? Do other realities exist
to be connected with and make synergy in the attempt to overturn a reality that isn’t one of the best, together with a crisis that in 2004 has marked a decrease, in some central months of the year, touching the 40% of the presence?
In one word: is it possible to go out of the corner and play all round a match that is far more important than it may appear, mostly in a moment of deep deindustrialization and of a crisis of the traditional productive system?
Not easy questions at all, to which it’s necessary to give real and immediate answers, if we don’t want to run the risk to extend that discrepancy that is more and more taking our country away from the others overlooking on the same Mediterranean basin.
The crisis of the traditional tourism in Italy has its roots in the recent past: the lack of research, a scarce adjustment of the structures, a fiscal policy that doesn’t lead to protracted openings, the attempt to reduce in time and space the holiday time to few canonical summer months and to some winter or spring “bridges”, has done in a way that the big foreign flows have been addressed towards other nations and that Italy represents no longer an easy-to spend opportunity for many tour operators.
The result is: reduced bookings, prices increased to adjust the costs , a sort of a dog biting his own tale and taking towards an overall recession of the sector. The change of our behaviour, after 11th September, linked also to the economic crisis that has hit the families, has taken to the result that is under everyone’s eyes.
Presences go down, bookings arrive with grater difficulty, while other nations take off and see their arrivals from abroad raising up in an exponential way. All that is also the fruit of the end of the conflict in the Balkan area but mostly of the missed adequacy of the Italian tourist system that is lower than other national standards.
In counter tendency - until when it is not given to know- the tourism of movement exploiting different potentialities and standing on families with their autonomous choices, with their capabilities to decide without any mediation where to spend their own leisure time and holiday, also this sector besides suffers for the crisis due to the same reasons that are provoking a recession in the traditional tourist system.
The missed adjustment of too many camping sites, the scarce attention of the local administrations, the incapability of many regions to turn towards a long lasting opening, the difficulty to relate to territories where the underworld plays an important roles, are creating problems of a certain importance.
Also in that case it’s necessary to get out of the corner and acquire a central function by occupying those spaces that the other traditional systems of the fruition of the leisure time have lost. Hence the necessity, first of all, to create a strong synergy with the territory and with its productive system.
These are big words, but they are not of a difficult realization.
We should imagine the territory not as a closed system (there is the one who makes tourism, the one who produces fruit, the one who commercializes niche products, the one who protects the artistic , cultural and country patrimony, the one who operates as a voluntary in the associations) but as a unique system in which all the components among them play an homogenous and integrated role.
How to move in such a reality? What choices to make? Who should the partners be?
It’s enough to follow the tourism reality of movement to realize that this “integrated tourist system” finds its own roots in the tourism at the open air.
Who moves by camping car prefers the places which offer their best open and safe, polyhedral and multicoloured under various profiles.
The cultural tourism, the thermal one, the enogastronomic one and the ecological one represent many components of a unique system that has in the camping car and in the caravan the ideal means to express oneself at best. Also, we can’t imagine an overall growth without involving in a serious project the local administration and the high quality producers.
The plain air tourism is everything but massification of the offer and tastes, it prefers the particular, it searches the individual: exactly what thousands of
co-operative societies, of little and middle-size farms every day carry out in our country.
What is missing is an integrated system that helps to know, improve and make real a unique project, easily recognizable.
Certainly, we need a new philosophy, a new approach to tourism, which moves away from hotels and holiday villages to involve the territory itself and to stimulate to produce, not only to sell things for the benefit of only a few shops but for the area itself in an integrated system: cheese, wine, bags, souvenirs, museums and the historic centres which become part of the attraction area.
It’s not difficult to put into practice such an operation: one needs to find favourable local administrations, town councils able to propose and producers witling to bet on their own future.
The battle against the massification of the offer (favouring products mostly coming from abroad) represents a bet that must be won at all costs.
Consequently it is necessary not to be constricted by a contingent crisis, but to play an all round match, knowing that the result is sure only if there is everyone’s will to be engaged seriously and shrewdly.