Artès, the well-known Professional Experiential Tourism organization in Italy, is excited to announce to have been selected as Training and Innovation Partner by BITESP – Borsa Italiana del Turismo Esperienziale – the first trade show entirely dedicated to incoming experiential tourism. In order to help tourism and passionate professionals to develop their skills in the industry and expand the experiential tourism offer in Italy, Artès and BITESP have launched a series of “training tours” that will take place in different cities in Italy.
Nonetheless, we believe it is very important to show you why we started this in the first place. Ready?
Experiential tourism, professionalism, and civil economy: the base of our partnership
Artès’ partnership with BITESP has deep roots and a common goal: the development of incoming experiential tourism in Italy.
It all started with a group of passionate and visionary people led by Maurizio Testa. Their dream? To develop an experiential and quality tourism product, widespread in Italy and coherent to a format throughout the country, which could create social value and a solidarity network.
This is how Artès project came to life. The team has worked hard to conceive, structure and launch the so-called “story-living” format, a type of experiential tourism shared standard that aims at building an innovative and highly professional experiential tourism product.
Professionalism, passion, creativity are the core features of a product that does not just apply a unique and rigid template; instead, the “story-living” format aims at offering a practical example of how professionals can create a unique tourism product in Italy and stimulate the tour demand and support the destination economy.
On the other hand, BITESP is sponsored by International Group, a company with more than 20 years in the commercial development of tourism and trade-show and events organization. Years ago Leonardo Surico, CEO at International Group, understood the potential of experiential tourism and in 2018 he launched the first Italian tradeshow entirely dedicated to this rapidly growing sector. His idea proved to be a winning choice: the first edition of BITESP held in November 2018 saw more than 2500 visitors and hosted many Italian and foreign buyers and sellers.
At the time BITESP started, Leonardo carefully analyzed the experiential tourism market and Artès appeared to be the first Italian operator of experiential tourism for professionalism and innovation. Thanks to the great work and enthusiasm of the team and the high quality of its training, developed through both in-class training and online webinars, Artès has been playing a great role in the development of the tourism sector in Italy.
This is why he decided to meet Maurizio Testa, first, and to invite Artès to participate in the first edition of BITESP, then.
During the first edition of BITESP, Maurizio Testa had the honor of the opening speech while the Artès Team were managing different seminars during the tradeshow. The feedback has been very positive, with a high value perceived of the seminars. All seemed to prove a great foundation for collaboration to start between Artès and BITESP.
It goes without saying that their meeting was a great success: Artès and BITESP team proved to have a clear common vision. Maurizio and Leonardo had the opportunity to further explore ideas and develop a common plan to work synergically together towards the same goal: to increase the awareness of a successful core experiential tourism model developed by Artès and BITESP.
This is how the idea of a Roadshow came up: a series of itinerant meetings where people can meet, discuss, collaborate around the topic of experiential tourism.
Roadshow Artès & BITESP: this is just the beginning
Our goal at Artès is very is ambitious: we want to support BITESP tradeshow throughout the year and far beyond the tradeshow itself to meet destinations and the professionals that make it such an interesting industry. Alongside this, we aim at:
- Presenting incoming tour operators with the value of experiential tourism as a way to leverage differentiation and innovation
- Offering training, consulting and design support to local operators who want to sell selected and quality products
- Activating collaborative mechanisms that help to get off the ground tourism of excellence and social value
During the roadshow meetings, we will present the program of BITESP 2019 that will be held in Venice from November 25th to 27th.
The last roadshows took place in:
- Catania on May 7th, at the Grand Hotel Villa Itria, thanks to the valuable support of the Sicily Convention Bureau and our local team member Angelita Messina
- Pisa, on May 16th with the support of the Confcommercio of Pisa and of our local team member Francesca Andruetto.
Next stop? Treviso, on June 27th … and many more to come!
Artès is very proud to support local professionals in developing their “story-living” format to come to life in the “stories to live together”.
Please feel free to have a look at our experiential tourism products on our website: we are looking forward to hearing from you about it!