A national portal for wine tourism in Italy

A national portal for wine tourism in Italy

Here is my contribution towards #campolibero, the 18 actions foreseen by the Ministero delle politiche agricole upon which Maurizio Martina asks us all for ideas and projects

 

Theme: COMPETITIVENESS AND JOBS
Section: National system for farm consultancy

PRESENTATION OF THE PERSON WHO IS WRITING
My name is Donatella Cinelli Colombini, in 1993 I founded the “Movimento turismo del vino” Wine tourism movement and I invented Cantine aperte, Wine day, the event which really pulled along the development of wine tourism in Italy. From 2001 to 2011 I was Tourist advisor for the city of Siena. Now I have a winery in Montalcino, I am president of the Consorzio dell’Orcia Doc and I am National vice-president of the Associazione Donne del vino. I teach wine tourism in post graduate and master courses in universities and I have signed 19 articles and books on the subject.
I think then that I have the credentials (from both a theory and practical point of view) to give the Ministro Maurizio Martina advice regarding wine tourism
SCENARIO REGARDING WINE TOURISM
This sectors business regards about 3 to 5 billion euro per year – according to how the generated income is considered- it regards about 21.000 wineries with direct sales with only about one thousand really organized for tourist welcoming. It should be organized through a territorial networks called Strade del vino, Wine routes, there are 170 of them and they are the real flop of this sector, as, only about 10 of them work. There is no real National oversight which coordinates the offer according to precise rules and who takes care of divulging and selling it through tourism fairs, the press, the OTA (online travel agencies), transport services ….. but most of all who organizes the web offer so that it be visible, attractive and buyable. To understand the state of things it is sufficient to visit the website for Italian tourism and the French one

http://www.italia.it/it/idee-di-viaggio/mangiare-e-bere.html

http://int.rendezvousenfrance.com/discover/champagne-vineyard

Wine and food has such an enormous potential and already now with the offer being “haphazard” it is the second reason behind trips towards Italy, and the first in the list of foreign visitors’ reasons for coming back to Italy. Even on a financial plane the couple food and wine is worth 11% of the foreign tourism expenditure which means about eight billion

Euros per year.

PROPOSED ACTION
NATIONAL CONTROL ROOM AND CREATION OF A PORTAL DEDICATED TO THE PROMOTION AND MARKETING OF WINE TOURISM
It is consequently worth to try an operation of reorganization for this offer segment creating a National office for “coordination and marketing” which within January 2015 do the most urgent thing which is to create a portal which contains the entire Italian wine tourism offer starting from the Legge 185 del 1999 regarding the Strade del vino.
Such an action will create, in fact, the National coordination of the sector and harmonize basing its judgement on minimum standards for wine tourism centres and wineries open to the public, but at the same time select the rest of the offer according to parameters which permit one to orient it towards tipicity and sustainability: lodgings and restaurants, food workshops and artistic handicraft, incoming services, cultural, natural and sporting attractions…. Such an action is very complex, but possible in a short time, and reasonable

cheap. It would have an enormous utility for the wine territories because it would help them to emphasize and market “the DOC as a touristic product” both online and on the market. Here is a practical example, as things stand now the majority of the Strade del vino web sites are in Italian, they are not indexed, kept up-to-date and surfable with a mobile phone. This means that the most of the wineries are invisible to tourists, and this is also due to the Highway Code that limits the positioning of signposts, so all the small wineries that have no resources or competence to do their own mapping, are excluded from wine tourism.

So a portal for promo-marketing of the wine tourism sector becomes the instrument able to set off several dynamics in sustainable and competitive development all over the National territory. Divulging of the differences between wine territories and to group them together according to the traveller’s trip motives.
At the same time, or successive it would be possible to propose the Strada del Parmigiano Reggiano, the Strada del Radicchio Trevigiano … and such for all of the quality food able to create fluxes of tourists.

I do not think that this is the right occasion to go into detail about such a proposal but I am absolutely sure of its utility and that there is a concrete possibility in creating it as a development of the activity already carried out by the Associazione Città del vino – CENSIS, Movimento Turismo del Vino – Università Bocconi.