No. 3 (2019)

Istat produces official statistics on tourism, from the supply side, through two ongoing surveys: Capacity and Employment in accommodation establishments. In the last period, there has been an increasing need to enrich the supply and quality of information and services provided to the country. Istat is working on various fronts to meet these demands and one of the most important challenges is the creation of a statistical register of accommodation establishments operating in Italy. The following article illustrates what Istat is doing to succeed. The register is important on several fronts: through the harmonisation of data on accommodation, establishments and the integration of several sources, there will be a single official list that will enrich the information on the sector. Linked to this task, Istat must deal with various implications that concern programmatic, conceptual and methodological aspects, but also the relationship with all the actors who, pursuing their institutional objectives, have the same interests as Istat.

Elected Italian Capital of Culture for the year 2017, Pistoia attracted a satisfying number of visitors and extended its reputation beyond the conclusion of the prestigious event. The figures for 2018 are indeed comforting and all positive compared to 2016. The decrease compared to 2017, which was also expected, only affected hotel businesses and only Italian customers. Non-hotel businesses and foreign customers always recorded positive changes. The region that contributed most to Pistoia's receptivity in the three-year period 2016-2018 was Lombardy. The foreign component ranked first: Germany by number of presences and China by number of arrivals. On average, foreigners stayed longer than Italians. The male population prevailed over the female population in both components. The age distribution, without being identical, does not show any particular differences between Italian and foreign customers. It seems, in fact, to be well correlated with the reasons given for staying in Pistoia: leisure, cultural interest, work, business, participation in trade fairs and congresses. Overall, the final balance related to the nomination as Italian Capital of Culture appears comforting and positive. The event, however, highlighted and illustrated the main reasons for attracting tourists, reasons that need to be consolidated and expanded in order to satisfy a growing number of visitors, both excursionists and guests staying in the city.

In recent decades, sustainability has become an increasingly important topic. Museums and other cultural heritage institutions are a powerful engine for local development. They are working to develop policies and practices that are sustainable not only environmentally and economically but also socially. This journey, so to speak, had its institutional crowning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in which, for the first time, museums and other cultural organisations were directly invested with shared responsibility for sustainable development. In this article, starting from the main international and Italian case studies, an analysis is developed on the path taken by museum institutions to respond to the SDGs.

The objective of this survey is to measure and quantify the capacity of tourism intermediation companies to be sustainable and competitive in providing sustainable tourism services located in Sicily. These companies were asked to fill in a questionnaire using the CAWI technique: it is filled in via Internet access through a dedicated link in the invitation mail, where this e-mail includes a username and password for each user. The questionnaire was structured in 3 parts. The sections are: Profile of the responding companies; Identification of "sustainability" parameters; Communication and competitive factors. Among the results obtained, we can see that newer companies pay great attention to the sustainable aspect; furthermore, there is a significant association between sustainable and competitive aspects; finally, the spread of networks and websites, focused on sustainable issues, played a key role in educating tourists.