Widespread Hotel: An Innovative Made in Italy Model for Cultural Tourism and Local Sustainable Development—The Umbria’s Case

Widespread hotels represent a new Italian phenomenon still not much investigated, both on theoretical and empirical side, which cannot be ignored anymore. Indeed they meet the need to implement techniques and management tools which are able to improve the culture-tourism binomial. This would permit to transform into valid instruments of national economical development, the shared declaration of intents for which culture and tourism, especially in Italy and in this particular fragile period, represent even more the main strategic levers for the sustainable development. This article intends to describe the potentiality of these widespread hotels as innovations particularly suitable with trends recently emerged in tourism sector and outline the phenomenon pattern in Italy with particular attention on Umbria region, in order to identify his main strength and weakness and some innovation to improve performance. To this end, it starts from the analysis of the national and international economic-managerial literature concerning in particular cultural and experienced trends shown in tourism. Then it introduces the main acquisitions about widespread hotels in Italy, updating and extending them through a desk survey based on indirect sources of various natures. Lastly, it describes the case of Umbria, analyzing more in depth making use of interviews with entrepreneurs/managers of hotels and based on a semi-structured questionnaire. The aspects of indeterminateness which were found, starting from the normative one, testify how the potentiality of the widespread hotels as far as regards the value creation for the enterprise itself and the territorial stakeholder, are still not properly understood and therefore used. It is clear that, therefore, new behaviors are needed for entrepreneurs and, most importantly, for local policy makers in order to create the conditions for the full success of these hospitality models.

Gli alberghi diffusi rappresentano un nuovo fenomeno italiano ancora poco indagato, sia sul piano teorico ed empirico, che non può essere ignorato. Infatti si incontra la necessità di implementare tecniche e strumenti di gestione in grado di migliorare il binomio cultura-turismo. In questo articolo si propone di descrivere le potenzialità degli alberghi diffusi come un’innovazione particolarmente adatta ad affrontare l’attuale periodo congiunturale difficile. Tale fenomeno è stato indagato in Italia, con particolare attenzione alla regione Umbria, con il fine di identificare i principali punti di forza e di debolezza.