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-personalization with relevant experiences delivered in real time
Objectives
Encourage tourism across Italy with a central hub for travelers 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
Personalize experiences for travelers 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-personalization
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 traveler. It’s no wonder why the United Nations World Tourism Organization has ranked Italy among the top locations for international tourism over the past decade.
Until recently, Italy did not have 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 coordinate strategy across regional tourism boards.
“The Ministry of Tourism’s primary mission is to oversee planning, coordination, and promotion of national tourism policies to make Italy even more attractive to travelers,” 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 travelers 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 organizations 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-personalization 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 organization achieves its goal of hyper-personalization.
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 centralized Experience Manager Assets DAM stores any type of assets, from beautiful images to engaging videos, to help inspire travelers 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 optimizing 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 organizations do, but act as a marketplace to highlight other organizations and offerings. Adobe Experience Manager gives us the flexibility to deliver any type of content across any channel.”
“It’s like having a personalized 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
Personalizing experiences for everyone
The next big step for the Tourism Digital Hub involves hyper-personalization. The Ministry of Tourism knows that travelers visit Italy for many reasons: outdoor adventure, history, museums, city life, food, and culture. Using personalization, 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 personalization 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 travelers might like. Customer data comes from many sources, including loyalty programs, 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 personalized 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 capitalize on the journeys driving the most bookings.
“Adobe and Accenture have been instrumental in helping us 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 Personalized Recommendations in Adobe Target to display the most relevant offers to visitors depending on their interests. Adobe Sensei also works to analyze and optimize 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 travelers and providers.
“Adobe and Accenture have been instrumental in helping us 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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