Italian tourism stuck in Web tangle

According to the Wall Street Journal this fall, the Italian government will revive plans to create a Web portal aimed at attracting tourists to the nation.

Though plenty of visitors flock to Italy’s cities, beaches and countryside all year round, over the last three decades the country has lost its primacy as a tourist destination to France, Spain, the U.S. and, more recently, China.

Through the official Web site, Italy plans to showcase its cultural, natural and gastronomical treasures while also helping tourists with hotel and travel bookings. The portal is scheduled to go live next spring.

The plan has critics, however. Five years have already been spent, and more than 45 million euros ($66 million) set aside, on creating the portal, and there’s nothing yet to show for it.

In 2003, the conservative government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi first thought up the “Choose Italy” project, which would be based on the Web site www.italia.it.

The plan was to emulate successful national-tourism portals such as www.spain.info, which cost 9 million euros to set up in 2002 and drew 65 million page views in 2007.

The Spanish Web site, along with a logo featuring Joan Miro’s sunny “Espana” emblem, has helped Spain become the world’s second-most-popular tourist destination after France.

For Italy, humbled by political and corporate scandals, the Web site also was supposed to project Italy’s bella figura, or attractive side, to the world.

But things quickly went wrong.

Several government ministries, in two administrations, and each of Italy’s 20 regions were involved in creating the portal.  Associations of travel agencies and hotel owners had their say as well, while the design and creation of the site was assigned to a consortium of three companies.

There was “no single guide telling us where to go with this,” said Luca Palamara, former managing editor of www.italia.it.

Simple disputes over whether to handle hotel bookings through the Web site went unresolved after a year and a half of discussion, Palamara said.

Technological issues also arose: The home page was not customizable, and its two main databases were not compatible.

When the Web site went live in February 2007—by that time, a new center-left government was in place in Italy—it was riddled with embarrassing blunders.

The first name of the famous Italian movie director Federico Fellini became “Gioacchino,” while Corsica-born Napoleon Bonaparte was made a native of the island of Elba, recalled Palamara.

Plans for an Italy logo didn’t do much better with WPP Group’s brand-consultancy unit Landor Associates winning a 100,000-euro government contract to design the logo.  But Landor’s symbol, a classically typed red and black letter “i” and an oversized, green letter “T,” fell flat.

The government eventually abandoned the logo, and last January the portal was shut down.  But the Web site’s misadventures are striking, considering that tourism is one of the country’s most successful industries.

Marco Ottolini, who was a consultant for one of the companies responsible for “Choose Italy,” said that perhaps too much money was thrown at it. 

A million-euro budget given to one agency would have been enough, he said.

Indeed, Spain’s portal was handled by a single public company, Segittur SA, working directly for the country’s tourism ministry.

“Spain created a brand.”  “Italy tried creating—without much success—a Web site,” said Manfredi Ricca, business director at the Italian unit of Interbrand, a global branding consulting firm that is part of ad holding company Omnicom Group and was briefly a consultant for the “Choose Italy” project in its early planning stages.

Ricca said that the government’s renewed efforts should focus on clarity of vision and that an “orchestra conductor” should be hired to coordinate the ideas of all of Italy’s government entities and regions.

A Report by The Mole