1.1 Background¶

The National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) has set as one of its objectives the revitalization of the economic sector of Tourism. Tourism in Italy, in fact, represents an important source of competitive advantage for the entire country, with 13% of GDP in 2017 (Bank of Italy) and counting over 500 thousand supply chain enterprises in 2019 with over 1.9 million employees (ISTAT). Tourism-related consumption in 2018 was around €84 billion (ISNART). ISTAT data reported, before the epidemic, arrivals - national and international - of around 131 million and presences of around 436 million (ISTAT).

Concerning Measure 4. «Tourism 4.0», Investment 4.1 - «Tourism Digital Hub» (TDH) is aimed at creating a dedicated web platform, which allows the connection of the entire tourism ecosystem to enhance, integrate and promote its offer.

The expected outcomes of TDH are:

• Increasing flows, destinations and spending, by increasing the quality of the offer and the related exposure of the Italian Points of Interest for Tourism (POI);
• Enhancing the existing framework of digital assets - e.g., regional portals - without any overlapping, while also offering cost saving solutions;
• Strengthening the role of TDH’s digital assets, defining them as real institutional reference points for searching for POI-related information with respect to an audience of national and international tourists;
• Involving the entire Italian tourism system through an open-source approach that collects input and generates output for all stakeholders;
• Retaining users (and therefore potential tourists) through tailored proposals based on their needs and preferences, offering a bespoke portal experience;
• Favoring the development of a platform that provides timely and correct information on POIs across Italy, and whose data will be used by external tracking platforms such as Google My Business, Bing Places, Apple Maps and so on - thus bringing an additional benefit in terms of visibility on the most common search engines.

The Ministry of Tourism, assisted by ENIT - the National Agency for Tourism, is in charge of coordinating the entire Italian tourism ecosystem, promoting, in a joint approach, the re-launch of tourism through a comprehensive and mixed offer of information and services, facing the continuous changes in national and international market demand.

The purpose of the TDH initiative is the re-launch of Italia.it, enriched with new internally produced content and in partnership with Regions and Autonomous Provinces, but also through integrations with partners in Tourism. In detail, for each topic discussed, the website will offer content with a triple relevance:

• Content of Interest: editorial content, which enables the TDH to infer the Person’s interest when reading it. It enables the description of one or more destinations, one or more offers and/or any type of event related to the tourist experience in our territory (e.g.: an editorial article that talks about the Palio of Siena, if read by the tourist, suggests interest for Siena and its historical pageants);
• Destination: local attraction related to a point of interest (x, y coordinates) or to a geographical area («geometry») that persists in the medium-long term (e.g., Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, the city of Rome, etc.);
• Offer: a touristic item that can be consumed/booked/seen for a fee (e.g., a hotel room, a museum entry).

TDH also aims at making the tourist market demand towards Italy profitably meeting the related Italian offer (provided by different actors), by connecting the individual’s (tourist) interests, destinations and offer before, during and after the tourism experience, creating value for all stakeholders involved.

Within the TDH, the design and implementation of an Integration Platform - Full Life Cycle API Manager is foreseen to support interoperability between applications and services both external and internal to the TDH:

• external services: second-party data (e.g., regions), third-party data (e.g., private and public organizations complementary to the national government system), geographical data;
• internal services: integration with internal TDH applications that are related to specific modules (e.g., CRM).

To achieve its goal of involving the whole Italian tourism system, the Integration Platform and API Manager ensures the IT and information coordination of data between Administrations (central, regional and local), Organizations and Third-Party Companies with the TDH Digital Ecosystem. A standard communication protocol between the TDH and the external world, defined TDH022, has also been adopted.

Accordingly, the TDH022 acts as a Digital Standard at National level, in charge of exchanging both «open» (open data) and «closed» (private data) data and contents among the participants, also being the integration interface between the TDH and the Industry Professionals interested in joining the Ecosystem and operating in the Italian domestic area.

Figure 1 - TDH ecosystem and external connection through TDH022 shows the Tourism Digital Hub and interconnection strategy.

Figure 1 - TDH ecosystem and external connection through TDH022

The interaction procedures with TDH Ecosystem allow both the use of digital services available in it and the development/supply of new ones (open or closed) making them available to Ecosystem members. In this sense, the interactions contemplate that the operators (public and private) adhering to the TDH022 can operate, depending on the case, as follows

• service provider, in case they provide any services and functionalities to TDH;
• service users, if they use digital services provided by third parties within the Ecosystem.