Discovering the beauty of Italy.
Italy’s Tourism Ministry builds a national hub for tourism from the ground up with Adobe Experience Cloud.
Sets the foundation for hyper-personalisation with relevant experiences delivered in real time
Objectives
Encourage tourism across Italy with a central hub for travellers to find information
Build a digital tourism hub from the ground up
Scale to support more than 20,000 tourism service providers in the first two years
Personalise experiences for travellers to encourage repeat visits and bookings
Results
Creates an actionable customer profile by reconciling multiple data sources
Delivers relevant experiences in real time, setting the foundation for hyper-personalisation
Automates offers with capabilities powered by artificial intelligence
Supports headless content for reuse across channels
From beautiful Mediterranean beaches to top ski resorts, ancient historical landmarks to exciting nightlife, Italy offers something for every traveller. It’s no wonder why the United Nations World Tourism Organisation has ranked Italy among the top locations for international tourism over the past decade.
Until recently, Italy hadn't got a ministry focused solely on tourism. That changed in 2021 when the government decided that this significant contributor to Italy’s economy needed a dedicated ministry to co-ordinate strategy across regional tourism boards.
“The Ministry of Tourism’s primary mission is to oversee planning, co-ordination and promotion of national tourism policies to make Italy even more attractive to travellers,” explains Francesco Paolo Schiavo, Director General at the Ministry of Tourism. “Our first goal has been creating the Tourism Digital Hub to grow tourism by connecting travellers from around the world with hotels, transportation, restaurants, tour guides and other tourism providers across the country.”
Because it’s new, the Ministry of Tourism needed to build its Tourism Digital Hub from the ground up. But starting with nothing threatened to be a lot of work, especially since the Ministry aimed to scale quickly with 20,000 tourism organisations offering services through the hub by 2024.
At the same time, building the new hub offered a unique opportunity to create a platform to meet the Ministry’s specific aims, including enabling hyper-personalisation to connect every visitor with exactly the content, providers and services that will most encourage them to visit Italy.
After evaluating technologies, the Ministry of Tourism chose to build its digital hub on Adobe Experience Cloud, including Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. Working closely with Adobe Professional Services and partner Accenture to define the project strategy and implement the solutions, the Ministry of Tourism is already starting to see the value.
“We wanted to stay focused on our goals and not have to spend a lot of time and resources building and maintaining a platform,” says Schiavo. “This led us to cloud-based solutions. Adobe Experience Cloud offers all of the functionality that we need in integrated apps, so we can reach audiences with exact information tailored to their travel interests.”
“Adobe Experience Manager gives us the flexibility to deliver any type of content across any channel.”
Francesco Paolo Schiavo
Director General at the Ministry of Tourism
Delivering tourism content across channels
The Ministry of Tourism worked closely with Professional Services and Accenture to create a multi-year roadmap for building out the Tourism Digital Hub, gradually adding complexity and functionality until the organisation achieves its goal of hyper-personalisation.
The first step involved building out the website, italia.it. The hub aims to feature a wide variety of content, from photographs of hotels overlooking the sea to articles about the annual artichoke festival in Rome.
Using Experience Manager Sites as a headless CMS opens up the potential for the Ministry of Tourism to reuse content across channels, including mobile apps, chat bots or social media. This helps to ensure that someone who starts exploring the italia.it website on their mobile device and then continues on their desktop computer will enjoy the same great content and experiences.
The centralised Experience Manager Assets DAM stores any type of assets, from beautiful images to engaging videos, to help inspire travellers to plan their journeys. Visitor experience is further enhanced with Dynamic Media, which uses Adobe Sensei to automate repetitive and time-consuming content tasks such as creating screen-based variants, cropping images and optimising for device performance. For people visiting the online tourism hub, this means that high-quality experiences follow them wherever they go.
“The more content, services and providers the better,” explains Schiavo. “Our job isn’t to control what individual organisations do, but act as a marketplace to highlight other organisations and offerings. Adobe Experience Manager gives us the flexibility to deliver any type of content across any channel.”
“It’s like having a personalised concierge service on hand and it’s all made possible with the robust real-time data capabilities of Adobe Real-Time CDP.”
Francesco Paolo Schiavo
Director General at the Ministry of Tourism
Personalising experiences for everyone
The next big step for the Tourism Digital Hub involves hyper-personalisation. The Ministry of Tourism knows that travellers visit Italy for many reasons: outdoor adventure, history, museums, city life, food and culture. Using personalisation, the hub can serve all visitors with more targeted content that they might be interested in. If someone comes to the hub and looks at pictures of the Alps, for instance, the website could surface deals for ski trips, transportation to the mountains or picturesque villas where they can stay.
The key to accomplishing this type of real-time personalisation is data. Using Adobe Analytics, the Ministry of Tourism gathers information about what visitors are doing on the website. This information feeds into Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, alongside first- and third-party customer data, to create a clearer picture of what information travellers might like. Customer data comes from many sources, including loyalty programmes, social media, regional databases or tourists who sign up for free Wi-Fi service funded by the Ministry. Real-Time CDP reconciles all of this data to deliver integrated, real-time profiles, ready for activation across channels.
“We can feed profiles into Adobe Journey Optimizer to deliver more relevant emails and other communications across channels,” says Schiavo. “We’re even looking to use location information through the mobile app to activate location-based communication. If a tourist is walking near a museum, it can trigger a push notification or email inviting them to visit. It’s like having a personalised concierge service on hand and it’s all made possible with the robust real-time data capabilities of Adobe Real-Time CDP.”
Ministry of Tourism also looks forward to using Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to quickly determine if the customer journeys they create work and make quick adjustments to improve results. By better understanding customer interactions and comparing different segments, the team can identify and capitalise on the journeys driving the most bookings.
“Adobe and Accenture have been instrumental in helping us to get this project off the ground. With Adobe Experience Cloud, we have the functionality, insights and scale to start raising the profile of tourism providers across Italy.”
Francesco Paolo Schiavo
Director General at the Ministry of Tourism
Powering new experiences with artificial intelligence Adobe’s AI services powered by Sensei add another layer of automation and efficiency to the Tourism Digital Hub. The Ministry of Tourism can take advantage of features such as Personalised Recommendations in Adobe Target to display the most relevant offers to visitors depending on their interests. Adobe Sensei also works to analyse and optimise keywords used by search engines, which results in faster reaction times and higher search engine rankings.
While the Ministry of Tourism is still working to expand its Tourism Digital Hub, it is already seeing positive results with growing engagement both from travellers and providers.
“Adobe and Accenture have been instrumental in helping us to get this project off the ground,” says Schiavo. “With Adobe Experience Cloud, we have the functionality, insights and scale to start raising the profile of tourism providers across Italy.”
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