Davide Branco MSc

The town where I served as Mayor, and were I lived since my childood, tourism was always the key industry; unfortunally, short vision, lack of expertises, lack of investments, bureocracy, old style tourism, change of tourism demand and customers set of priorities and more negative factors, made tourism and related services laying behind and close to the dead. As the Mayor, the main challenges were the breaking of a kind of single acting attitude, the mitigation of political dispute, the missing cooperation between all actors, the lack in long term planning, the blindness in understanding that tourist offer changed and need to readapt, the bureaocrazy, the skiils and competences, the poor infrastructures and more structural reasons indeed. I might say that the stubbern attitude to believe that the long tourist tradition of the town was enough as competitive advantage to attract tourists but this was not true; tourism is a product and as any other product it changes and there is a need to innovate otherwise you are out of market. In current times, potential tourists have unlimited offers at smart phone source and availability of worldwide tourist's destinations so, understanding the change in consumers' models and INNOVATION must be the winning factors.