Tourism, internal areas increasingly attractive but the services hub remains

Tourists leave the (art) city centers to discover the province and the hinterland. An economic opportunity for internal areas, territories at high risk of depopulation, as long as we work on services.

For years, Italian tourism has grown by concentrating in the same places, but something is changing. The research "Broadening horizons: online platforms and the diversification of Italian tourism" by the consultancy firm Formules, which will be discussed in Pordenone on 5 November as part of Eureka Expo, examines ten years of bookings on the GetYourGuide platform (marketplace for excursions and experiences) and shows that visitors are increasingly interested in provinces and inland areas, in addition to large centres.

In 2015, Lazio collected the clear majority (72%) of tour bookings and 97% of the total was absorbed by this and three other regions: Veneto, Lombardy and Tuscany. Ten years later - also thanks to the expansion of the activities of GetYourGuide, founded in 2007 in Switzerland: in Italy the volume of bookings has grown 36 times in a decade - Lazio has dropped to 39% and demand affects all Italian regions. Including internal areas and therefore territories far from schools, hospitals and connections which cover over 60% of the Italian territory, with 4,000 municipalities, mostly small, and a total of 13 million inhabitants. These are territories at high risk of depopulation, affected by youth emigration and not very attractive in terms of investments, excluding particular cases.

54% of the 867 Municipalities involved in the GetYourGuide experiences (present in 105 of the 110 Italian provinces) had less than 10,000 inhabitants, 35.76% less than 5,000 and 7.38% less than 1,000 (photograph referring to the presence of the platform in 2025).

Bookings of activities through the platform convey the image of a movement that crosses urban borders: between 2021 and 2025 bookings in the province of Rome grew almost eight times. In the Verona area they increased by more than seven, also thanks to Lake Garda, and in 2025 they increased while those in the capital decreased. In 2021 and 2022, experiences booked in the province of Naples exceeded those in the city.