Trahit sua quemque voluptas. The multidimensional satisfaction of foreign tourists visiting Italy

Is everyone truly drawn by his or her own delight? Tourist satisfaction - and hence the attractiveness of key tourism destinations - is a multifaceted phenomenon, the understanding of which requires fully integrated and multidimensional interpretative frameworks. Assuming that tourist satisfaction plays a crucial role in defining the present and future of any tourism product or service, we focus on the perception that foreign visitors have of Italy as tourism destination by adopting a multidimensional approach that is based on quantitative information derived from official statistics. Using microdata from the Survey on International Tourism conducted by the Bank of Italy in 2016, the perceived quality of Italian tourism was assessed using an original framework grounded in the counting approach proposed by Chakravarty and D'Ambrosio (2006) and the dominance criterion introduced by Lasso de la Vega (2010). This methodology allows evaluation of the satisfaction of specific subgroups of tourists and analyses differences in perceived quality that is attributable to specific sociodemographic traits. By investigating multiple aspects of tourist satisfaction with a common interpretative framework, the empirical results of this study constitute an advanced knowledge for evaluation of the efficiency of policies promoting tourism attractiveness in Italy.