Ah! Italy!
The house of joy!
Seriously, is outside there even a single person who has never thought about going to vacation, or else, to live in the beautiful boot-shaped peninsula?
If it’s 100% true that Europeans aim to the so-called “American Dream”, it’s also true that major of United States’ inhabitants would literally die to have a chance to experience a walk through the streets of Rome, or shop in Milan, or sunbathe among the beautiful southern Italy beaches.
Italy is par excellence, the most touristic country in the world. And, like every country that gets visited every single day by thousands and thousands of tourists, it needs to have the right structures to host them.
According to many sources, to this day in Italy, there were 33.166 hotels, and over 180,000 non-hotel establishments offering, overall, over 5.1 million beds. The largest accommodation capacity is in the North-East, with 1.8 million beds. But are all of them qualified to guarantee perfect service for their guests?
First of all, there are three main typical structures for tourists you are going to find in Italy, as well as in most of Europe:
-Hotels so-called;
-Bed & Breakfasts;
-Vacation Homes.
I had the opportunity to travel a lot, almost every summer, and I have stayed in many structures that offered me very diverse services.
So, a hotel is perfect if you are the kind of person who just wants to chill on vacation and enjoy every minute of it, without having the needing for cooking, washing, or anything else you might be doing at your house. Imagine you are visiting Rome, and want to go resting after an exciting day caught into the spectacular antiquities of an extinct empire capital. A hotel has all of the comforts you might need.
If you happen to be a more adventurous type, you would absolutely enjoy the refreshing freedom of a condo as a vacation home. You are free to rest in your own house, but at the same time, you have a fun time at the corner. Basically, it’d be like living in a theme park.
Or else, if you don’t really care about space, great comforts, and a bathtub with a jacuzzi included, you can very well enjoy the tranquillity of a B&B.
Now, we do know that hotels are categorized through stars ratings. 1 star = sleeping in the middle of a muddy road. 2 stars = You’re lucky if there are not going to be any spiders under your mattress. 3 stars = Decent. 4 stars = definitely comfortable. 5 stars = Like, that’s the best you could ever get in a lifetime. 5 stars L (That stands for Luxury) = I mean, who are you? Jeff Bezos? Like, I’ll die to be in your shoes.
So, as you can observe by yourself, a starless or a star in plus is literally a change. If you want to have a beautiful vacation with your family and a stressful mother-in-law that won’t stop complaining about the trip and her aches, well you got to go for the two maximum ratings. If you are travelling with a group of young friends or alone, you probably don’t even care if you find a little surprise under your pillow during the night.
But now, jokes aside. Are Italian hotels able to surpass or touch the standards of services most requested by foreign tourists?
Let’s get into it!
For a person that has been travelling almost all of his life throughout Europe, I might tell you that Italian hotels are the most diverse on the whole continent. I mean, a 5-star hotel in Milan cannot be compared to a 5-star hotel in Cagliari, or in Campobasso. We do not have perfect hotels, but perfectible ones.
But all in all, to be quite fair, Italians know how to make guests feel at home. Even though we must recognize that in other countries, they are much more advanced. French, English, and German hotels have services that have almost never been seen in Italy. What are we really missing?
I feel like there are just a few structures that fully satisfy customers’ requests. The Novotel chain, the Hilton chain, is already projected into the future. I’m not only talking about H 24 services, or breakfast in bed, but also the staff’s humanity; in these hotels, the typical clerical approach, like robots that other stewards generally have in Italian hotels, evanishes. They thus become advisers, friends, companions, guides. For the rest, I observed that services aren’t impeccable, but carried out with such carelessness that astonishes.
Well, you know what the Latins said, right?
“Mens sana in corpore sano”
That’s a lot to say.
If we want it to work, then the whole mechanism around us must work. Let’s improve it from the outside first. And this is what Italian hotels have to tackle.
ECommerce is the turning point for this.
Alongside eCommerce, we can make 1-star hotels look like 3-star ones, by giving better furniture to them. Most of the time, the mono-star hotels are compared to closets, yet we should improve them because we can do much more than this. We can make a dream come true, with eCommerce we can reach the impossible, by making single star hotels look like luxury ones.
In my opinion, we should start from the bathrooms, because those are places where a person should be able to refresh himself after a beautiful day out and avoid that he may find himself in front of not very pleasing shows. Dirty toilets, filthy bidets, malfunctioning showers. We should also work more on the kitchens, because we are feeding part of our soul to these people, and not something to make his hunger go away. We are not giving dreams to them, but important realities. That’s a big lack in Italian restaurants.
Also, the reception bureaucracy could be really slow sometimes. We have to fasten our times because we don’t have to help a customer, we have to serve him because of the service he is paying for, but also because he is a human, a friend, and so we are supposed to be.
ECommerce will make this come true. Beds won’t be beds anymore, but clouds of the universe. Restaurants won’t only be restaurants, they would be heaven for people’s stomachs, but especially, staffs won’t be staffs, they will be friends. ECommerce will lead-heavy selections to find appropriate people that don’t want to work, but to make people happy.
ECommerce = EPerfect.
Yes, we might not be perfect, but we can still reach for perfection because we have it inside of us.
Those are the keys that open the doors of success, that one day will make all Italian hotels owners change their own slogan into
“Welcome to Hotel Perfection!”
Not a hotel, but your house.
Not a staff member, but a friend.
Not a vacation, but a trip to paradise.
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