The narrated beginning of this journey of ours — a working journey — one that commits us to offering you accurate, valuable information about the travel industry itself.
To speak about Italy’s experiential tourism offering to the very people who produce it by creating it, who buy it from abroad, or who sell it abroad. Italy Travel Experience (ITE) is born with this intent, addressing the sector’s key players: hoteliers, travel agents, tour operators and DMCs. We make you the protagonists in the eyes of the public and of businesses — or rather, we seek out the information and turn it into the news that will naturally let you get to know one another and connect. Among our readers will also be tour guides, experience creators and promotional bodies. And we will meet one-on-one with those small entrepreneurs who invent the experiential tourism product from scratch, applying it even in difficult contexts, perhaps subject to seasonality. The green challenges. We will talk with the industry’s big names and meet the players in the supporting economy that the entire tourism supply chain generates — and they are not to be underestimated. We will publish our readers’ trips, analysing them to understand what the tourist is missing and how to improve their experience. And we write Italy Travel Experience’s online pages daily in English as well, with the aim of connecting everyone as effectively as possible through the language that dominates international economic exchange.
To deepen our reasoning and to assist us in the newsroom, we also draw on the very same artificial intelligence that the modern tourist now considers indispensable on their travels. And we discuss how AI is sliding into the tourism industry, with accommodation providers implementing it to make services available in smart mode and, of course, to sell them.
Istat’s figures for 2025 speak of a full 535 million overnight stays in the Belpaese — a number that, to put it in perspective, exceeds the entire population of the United States by 50 per cent. We need to run through the total of foreign visitors to grasp how much they spend, too: 57.1 billion euros that same year, according to estimates from the CST (Centro Studi Firenze) study for Assoturismo Confesercenti. In short, foreign tourists’ spending in Italy in 2025 alone amounted to almost double what was budgeted in the 2026 Budget Law.
We could say that Italy as a country would be capable of sustaining itself on tourism alone. Something similar was written by Michel Houellebecq in his novel The Map and the Territory, when he imagined a deindustrialised France driven solely by tourism. The path being set out did indeed seem the same in Italy too. And it seemed to be shared not only with our cousins across the Alps but with the rest of that Europe which, in 2025 alone, generated across all 27 member states a full 793 million international visitors — that is, half of world tourism, according to UN Tourism data. But a reversal of trend is impacting that dream of living on tourism alone, turning it into an illusion to be postponed. First the pandemic, then the wars, and lately nationalisms, seem to make us favour industrialisation over touristification, militarisation and defence over hospitality. In short, the race for energy supply is a higher priority than the incoming figures.
But Italy has always been able to prove its resilience by overcoming every challenge produced by crises in domestic tourism. To describe one such recent challenge — won despite the high fuel costs hitting the airlines: in July 2026, amid the full chaos of oil-barrel prices, foreign arrivals in Italy rose by 5.1% compared with July 2025, according to Mitur data.
Things go well for Italy because not everyone sits right in the middle of the Mediterranean, with the Alps and coastlines to the west and east, and magnificent islands. Not everyone has a tourism offering so varied and, above all, so experiential, written into their very DNA — made of regional uniqueness, flavours, products and delicacies that make a holiday in Italy a complete, 360-degree sense of wellbeing.
That wellbeing — despite wars, nationalisms and a sense of insecurity — is something we need. Yet it is a far more nuanced need. Because we have all travelled, thanks also to the low-cost flights that have made it possible for a long time now. Everyone has now seen Rome or Paris, but today, to go back, we look for an experience that helps us live those places in a different way. That way is experiential. Italy Travel Experience brings together those who seek that experience, those who build it, invent it and make it available.
To tell the story of the business behind a holiday that is no longer the classic week carved out of one’s annual leave, but also the free time of half a day — time devoted to regenerating, to socialising, to caring for body or soul, in zen-like calm or in adrenaline-seeking adventure.
Ours is an arduous challenge. Consider the word “viaggio” in its original meaning which, as Bruce Chatwin explained in The Songlines (1987), corresponds to the English “travel” — itself derived from the French travail (work). The paradigm, then, is this: travel, travail — that is, work: a difficult but regenerating journey from which we will not shrink for our readers.
Andrea G. Cammarata