Italy, our border neighbor, is a very popular destination for French tourists.
The popularity of its regional capitals is well established: Rome, Venice and Milan are victims of their own success, and are even affected by mass tourism.
Highlighting new territories, or engaging destinations with a strong reputation towards more responsible and authentic tourism, are issues that are addressed by the Italian National Tourist Office.

Let’s meet Federica Galbesi, Director of ENIT in Paris, with whom we worked on these themes through 4 influence operations.

• Can you introduce yourself and tell us more about your position at the Italian National Tourist Board?

I’m Director of the Italian National Tourist Office.
We’re responsible for promoting Italy as a tourist destination on the French market.
Tourism is one of the most important sectors of the Italian economy.
Since 2015, ENIT has had the status of a public economic entity under the control of the Ministry of Cultural Assets and Activities and Tourism.

• What clichés does Italy face, and what are the challenges ahead?

One of ENIT’s main challenges is to spread tourism throughout the country, and thus to turn away from the more well-known cities to see them in a different, and above all more responsible, way.
In this way, we hope to encourage the development of sustainable tourism in Italy by encouraging French tourists to change their travel habits.

• You carried out an influencer campaign with various French influencers in several Italian regions (Venice, Milan and Turin, Urbino and the Basilicata region). What were the objectives of this operation?

The main objectives of these influencer operations were to rejuvenate Italy’s target audience by reaching younger people on social networks via the influencer community, and to develop the destination’s visibility and brand awareness.

The campaign was carried out in 2019 in collaboration with Travel Insight and Voyages Couture, a travel agency specializing in the organization of tailor-made trips.
They were in charge of all the organizational aspects (reservations, creation of the travel log…).

The operation organized in Venice with Léa Camilleri, a Youtuber with 512,000 subscribers on her channel, highlighted another facet of Venice that is still little known to tourists.
The challenge is to change the clichés of the destination to preserve the beauty and authenticity of the city, while reducing mass tourism.
One example is the hordes of tourists who flock to the Bridge of Sighs, one of the city’s most emblematic landmarks, even though Venice has so much more to offer its visitors.

We also called on Carolananas, who spent 4 days discovering Urbino and Gradara.
Two Italian cities with a strong artistic and historical heritage.
The objective?
To highlight the town where Raphael (Raffaello), the famous Italian painter, was born and lived part of his life, as 2020 represents the ^500th anniversary of his death.
A great opportunity to showcase the Marche region.
During the operation, Carolane published content using the hashtags #raffaello500, #treasureitaly and #italietourisme.

Guillaume Ruchon and Raphaël Simacourbe then headed off to Milan and Turin.
Turin has been elected City of Cinema in 2020, so they visited the Cinema Museum and its famous panoramic elevator, which celebrates its ^20th anniversary in 2020.
What’s more, to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci’s death in 2019, they had the chance to discover a unique exhibition at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.

And finally, the last operation in this campaign was carried out in collaboration with the Droners, a couple of travel influencers.
They flew to Basilicata, to promote this region of Italy located in the south of Italy between Calabria and Puglia.
In particular, they created content to highlight Matera, a town carved entirely out of limestone and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as the Baroque towns of Nardo and Lecce.
The aim?
Introduce the French to these splendid yet little-known destinations, and enable Italy to spread tourism across its various regions.

• How did you measure the impact of this influencer campaign?
  Using which KPIs?

The results of the campaign were positive.
These were measured by the following KPIs: The number of likes, comments, shares, impressions and reach.
We also took into account the number of times articles were read and the number of views of videos published on Youtube.
However, the Office doesn’t make any sales, so the results are difficult to quantify, and are therefore referred to as ROE (return on engagement).

• In the future, would you like to use influencers again?

Probably yes, but not just yet.

• Travel Insight helped you set up an influencer campaign.
  How did you benefit?

This allowed us to centralize the operation and not get bogged down in procedures.
The agency was with us from the outset, i.e. selecting the influencers, which enabled us to discover new influencers we hadn’t thought of, to creating and negotiating contracts with these influencers, right through to monitoring the organization, making sure everything ran smoothly, and finally analyzing the impact of the operations.

Although we missed the contact with the influencers because everything was handled from A to Z by the agency, this first collaboration was positive.