New trends in high-end tourism markets

Over the last decade, like the world of consumption, the way we travel has also undergone a progressive transformation.

The strategic factor determining purchasing choices has gradually shifted from 'good' to 'experience', to unconventional elements.

Under the impetus of experientialism, the tourism sectors, especially the high-end ones, have thus become more and more unstructured, segmenting themselves into specialised niches linked to the various travel experiences and at the same time intertwining, shifting the organisational set-up from standard models to pure tailoring.

The traditional way of travelling and visiting places is surpassed by the search for dynamic situations in which interrelationships are generated between the visitor, the visited element and the context, allowing the traveller to experience and actively enter into the true essence of the place: it is the encounter with the "Genius loci", through its icons and its most authentic values.

This is a new dimension that requires targeted, tailor-made proposals that know how to combine the area's historical, artistic, cultural and landscape heritage with its most exclusive products: from wine and food to fashion, from craftsmanship to music and design, and with accurate accommodation services that are an expression of the best tradition of hospitality.

Experience is formed on a personal basis and depends on the particular tastes and needs of each individual customer.

"Customising" is therefore today's watchword, no longer "standardising", with necessarily high levels of performance aimed at conveying in a simple, sober and direct manner the most authentic values of the territory, quite different in substance from those most commonly used by the various forms of industrialised tourism.

From service providers to emotion providers

In this new market, it is not so much equipment and services as such that create value, but their capacity to produce emotions, and from this point of view, hotels, restaurants and tourism system operators in general become first and foremost suppliers of emotions and customised experiences.

A new wind in these markets is disrupting the traditional canons of the tourism and events industry, subverting those systems of production and service delivery that were the basis of its industrialisation process imposed by overseas models from the 1960s-70s onwards.