A new model for economically sustainable tourism

IDM Südtirol-Alto Adige is a driving force for sustainable economic development in Italy’s autonomous province of South Tyrol region.

South Tyrol is famous for its nature and its produce. The province, northernmost in Italy, is home to just more than a half million people.

It’s not hard to drive tourism in one of the most naturally stunning places on Earth. Indeed, the region welcomed around 8 million arrivals in 2023.

Today, the challenge for popular destinations like South Tyrol is promoting sustainable tourism. For IDM, this means facilitating smooth tourist flow while supporting the region’s economic growth sustainably.

This means:

• Protecting local produce. The region’s agricultural sector produces wines, smoked ham (or speck) and apples that can earn a “Quality South Tyrol” label. IDM wants to protect and promote these products.

• Promoting local businesses. Small, family-run businesses are the backbone of South Tyrol’s economy. Locals shop at small bakeries and butcher shops, less so in supermarkets. IDM wants to ensure the competitiveness of such businesses.

• Recapturing commission revenues. Each year, about €30 million in tourism revenue goes abroad, largely through commission fees that international booking platforms charge local operators. IDM wants to bring more bookings in-house so those commissions don’t leave the region.

• Spreading tourism more evenly across the year. South Tyrol has two peak seasons: Winter and summer. Although spring and fall are lovely, too few beds get booked during the low seasons. IDM wants its digital ecosystem to help identify overcrowded hotspots and encourage low-season travel to reduce that strain.

Realizing IDM’s digital vision means overcoming certain challenges, including:

• Incomplete and disparate databases. Accommodation data across the region exists across multiple databases, with different owners, and the quality of that data can vary. Bringing booking flows into a central location means cleaning up and reconciling these kinds of data management challenges. The same problem exists for customer data: Incomplete and fragmented databases make it difficult to tailor communication and offers to individual consumers.

• 100-plus stakeholders. IDM is a public-owned company with dozens of stakeholders, who often have competing interests. This means individual tourism organizations can find themselves competing for regionally relevant keywords in their digital marketing campaigns.

• User experiences. This is another consequence of that region-level competition. Guests and customers have had to learn new page structures and user interfaces every time they visit another website in South Tyrol.

Our role in this project has focused on strategic advice and orchestration. We identify what data and insights we can use to help IDM achieve the vision for South Tyrol. This is the core competence that allows us to reimagine digital travel.

Defining the strategy

In April 2020, we began by helping IDM answer basic strategic questions: What will the future business model look like, who will be the users and their journeys, what will be the needs of involved stakeholders? We also analyzed existing websites, apps and available external technical infrastructure like the Open Data Hub and booking engine.

In September 2020, we delivered a digital strategy along with a technical blueprint and a high-level backlog for the new digital ecosystem. That ecosystem included a CMS, a CRM, a customer data platform, an app and a digital guest card system, all built with a composable approach.

Consulting on content best practices

Next, we deployed user-centric methodologies like card sorting and tree testing to reimagine the site’s information architecture. In collaboration with IDM’s content team, we outlined a content experience strategy that included personas, customer journeys, a content audit and a content governance model.

This is an ongoing engagement, so we prefer to think of our current results as a snapshot of work that’s very much in progress.

The major wins so far:

• We helped IDM relaunch the MVP of the website. We have already seen marked improvement across KPIs such as conversion rates for bookings, newsletter subscriptions and time spent on site.

• We have nudged the team toward a product culture in which individuals own their domains of expertise — moving away from a culture of project-by-project coordination.

• We reimagined navigation structures to be more user-centric, reduced the total number of pages on the website, empowered the content teams to create higher-quality editorial pages and boosted SEO efforts.