Sectors · Tourism

Promoting a destination, for the people who bring the guest

Destination portals, DMOs, consortia, public bodies, product clubs, long-distance walking routes and event organisers. Promoting a place means selling an offer that isn’t yours, and deciding around a table rather than at a desk. We have worked with people in this trade since 1998, and we know how long it takes.

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The people who bring the guest, not the ones who host

A hotel sells its own rooms, and it sets the price, the standard and the opening hours. You sell what belongs to other people. A destination portal, a consortium, a public body or an event organiser puts together an offer from businesses it does not control, and it is still you who answers for the promise made to the visitor.

Everything else follows from that. You have to ask for content from people who owe you none, hold the quality together without being able to impose it, and measure the result across a whole area while each member looks only at what reached them.

Thirteen of our seventy clients work this way, ten of them portals and consortia, three of them event organisers. They are the largest projects we take on and the slowest to start, because between the first meeting and the signature there is a process no single person controls.

An owner decides in one meeting, a board in three stages

The real difference between a project for a property and a project for an area is not the website. It is how you get to yes.

Aspect	A business owner	A board
Who signs	The person in the room	A board, often not in the room at all
How the decision is made	In one meeting, sometimes one phone call	In stages, from the technical contact to the committee and on to the general meeting
What a yes requires	A quote and a date	Material the contact can present alone
Where the money comes from	The company’s own account	Member fees, or a fund with rules of its own
If the decision maker changes	The project carries on	The project has to be argued again from scratch

What no tender document ever says

Destination projects nearly always stall on the same three things, and none of them is the website. We put all three on the table with you before we start.

Nobody funds the year after

Grants cover the build. Hosting, updates, editorial work, campaigns and operator support all start on the day of handover, and you will almost never find them already in your budget sheet. That is the line we ask you to put in writing before signing, with an annual figure and a budget heading.

It gets decided while the tender is written, not after

Once a project is funded, its scope is already settled, because it lives in the tender documents, and those are written months before you call a supplier. The questions that really change a project are the ones you have to ask inside that window. How you answer a tender and how you report on a fund are covered on the tourism portals page.

The result belongs to the area, the sums are done by the member

A destination project is measured on collective numbers such as arrivals, overnight stays and weeks filled out of season. Each member, though, looks at what reached them, and the renewal gets lost in that gap. What the project can bring an individual operator, and what it cannot, we put in writing with you at the start, while everyone still agrees.

The destinations we have worked on

In 1998 we built one of the first inbound tourism portals in Umbria. Destination tourism has been a fixed part of our work ever since, not a specialism added later.

The portfolio holds destination portals such as YesAbruzzo and UmbriaSì, consortia and cooperatives such as Il Bosso and the Slow Tourism association, and events with a date that does not move, such as the Umbria Green Festival across twelve towns, the SpoletoNorcia MTB race and the Olio e Farro fair in Alviano.

Frequently asked questions

No, and most of our clients in this sector are not. They are consortia, associations, cooperatives, companies with a public shareholder and private event organisers. With a public body the procedure changes, not the project. You get a tender or a direct award, longer approvals, and formal constraints to read before the proposal is written.

Months here are not hotel months. Between the first meeting and the resolution come one or more passes through a committee or a general meeting, and with a tender involved you wait for its window. We prepare the material so you can take it into the room without us.

Usually yes, and the software is rarely the problem, because in most cases the listings were empty or badly written on launch day, and nobody has had a reason to go back to them since. Recovering them is editorial and relationship work, not a platform job. How that is done is covered on the tourism portals page.

Yes, three of our clients in this sector run events. The calendar is what changes, because the date does not move, the traffic peak lands on the day registrations open, and campaigns have to close weeks ahead, not the night before. The work is compressed into a few weeks and repeats every year, so we leave everything ready for your next edition.

Where to go next

The other sectors

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