(Tiper Stock Exchange) – Approximately 9.9 billion euros will be spent in Italy in August to eat outside the home. Between breakfasts, lunches, aperitifs, dinners, ice creams and sweets, about half of the entire expenditure, i.e. 4.7 billion, will come from tourists, both foreign and Italian. However, if international tourism continues to grow, thanks to an important return of visitors from the United States and despite a slowdown in flows from the Far East, we are still below pre-pandemic levels, with some clouds gathering on the front of domestic tourism. This is the photograph taken by the Fipe-Confcommercio Study Center, the Italian Federation of Public Exercises.
Despite the 28 million Italians who, according to data from the Confcommercio-Swg Tourism Observatory, will go on holiday this summer, uncertainty remains regarding the trend in consumption in the two months that have already ended (June and July) and in what has just begun (August ). It is precisely in July, in fact, that among the exhibitors the share of those who see the season with pessimism prevails: the balance between the positive judgments on the trend of the activity and the negative ones is equal to -33.1%. In August, the situation improved but, also in this case, the balance of assessments remained negative and stood at -17.8%.
What worries the exhibitors the most is not so much foreign tourism, for which the evaluations are firmly positive, as that of Italians, who represent the largest portion of the tourist clientele. In drawing up an initial assessment of a season still in progress, 42.7% of exhibitors see substantial stability compared to 2022, while 41.9% indicate a decline. Only 15.3% can speak of growth. With these assumptions and in a particularly complicated context both from a geopolitical and cyclical point of view (slowdown of the economy, inflation and rate increases), achieving the objectives for 2022 would therefore already be an excellent result.
“The data tell us that international tourism could reach pre-Covid levels, with an important return of travelers arriving from the United States. Domestic tourism, on the contrary, shows signs of slowing down”, declared Luciano Sbraga, Deputy Director General of Fipe-Confcommercio. “It is a trend that already emerged in the months of May and June, when the weather conditions heavily conditioned the desire of Italians to move to the seaside resorts, and which could have a tailspin, hopefully short, even in the following months. For these reasons – explained Sbraga – the expectations for this season are to achieve the objectives of 2022 by abandoning the (suggestive) idea of equaling or even exceeding the pre-pandemic levels.The consumption data – concludes the deputy director – demonstrate in a wayo the unequivocal importance of catering in the tourist economy of our country”