Italy`s tourism industry needs emergency government aid
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Italy<.>`s once-buoyant tourism industry is suffering its worst crisis in half a century and needs emergency government aid, according to Italian business group Confindustria<.>. It maintains that the number of tourists visiting Italy plummeted in the wake of the 11 September attacks on the USA, with some tour operators reporting a 70 per cent drop in business in the last couple of months of 2001.
However, the prognosis from Confindustria may be overly pessimistic. Admittedly, according to WTO data, Italy registered a 5 per cent drop in arrivals in 2001, to 39.1 million. But data from the European Travel Commission, meanwhile, points to a stagnation in arrivals. And other estimates are even more optimistic. Unfortunately, data from ENIT, the national tourism organisation, is still very sketchy and this explains why there are so many different estimates. Most also assume that it will have been a bad year since 2000 was such a good one.
More importantly, perhaps, what is going to happen in 2002. According to CISET, the picture is very similar to what it was last year. Overall growth in arrivals in Italy from foreign markets is forecast at 1.2 per cent, with the leading 21 sources achieving only 0.5 per cent growth. In absolute terms, this implies growth of 1.9 per cent from Central Western Europe, Italy`s major source. In 2002 Austria will also take over as the leading growth source.
From non-European sources the picture remains fairly gloomy. Canada is the only long-haul market that showed positive growth in 2001 - of 0.9 per cent - but it will likely decline by 1.2 per cent in absolute volume in 2002. Japan will suffer the sharpest drop in 2002, of around 7.0 per cent. This is almost double the forecast decline for non-European arrivals in Italy overall.
Vicky Karantzavelou
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Wednesday, March 27, 2002
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