In general, the Italian tourism system is not used to customer “research”, has not developed commercial policies and synergistic actions, nor has  created marketing and web-marketing systems (online, mobile and social media).

In the culture of hospitality, the relationship between guest and host has changed: we seek less forms of entertainment as an end in themselves and more experiences that develop our knowledge, through the relationship with the people and places we visit. The tourist is not only the one who is on vacation, but is a subject driven by motivations ranging from social and environmental issues to the emotions aroused by the places he visits. Less and less the tourist is the one who “consumes” the territory, but asks instead to live it, actively participating in what happens on that territory and in those communities.

Despite a long period in which our country has lived – and in some aspects, still lives today – thanks to tourism and related activities, for some years Italy has shown some critical issues that have translated into a decrease, in general, of tourist flows:

• sporadic public interventions often unrelated to the target audience;
• difficulty in coordinating actors and subjects in the sector, who work individually;
• limited attention to the quality levels of the tourist product;
• distance between what is proposed and what the tourist is looking for;
• difficulty to offer specific competences for the promotion of the territory.