(Finance) – Italy has the largest number of sites included in the list of world heritage sites and most of these are in the cities of art. “It is the wealth of our country around which a supply chain that lives thanks to these tourist attractions is built” observes the president of Fiavet, Ivana Jelinic. Companies also fall into this supply chain Fiavet which are suffering the damage of the loss of two essential markets for the cities of art: the Asian one and the Russian one.
“Failure to accept the vaccines Russian and Chinese for the Green Pass it is creating enormous damage: infrastructures and services suffer, and damage is added to those who are already in a serious situation ”declared the president of Fiavet. Just think that in cities like Rome the tourism China had become the third market for arrivals in 2019 and that the European tourism year started from Venice in 2018 by redesigning the Silk Road.
In some markets we are at a net loss, but the Russian and Chinese markets no longer exist. It is about flows tourist which weigh heavily in the balance of payments for the numerous services associated with travel (personal shopper, tickets for events, museums, personalized visits). “Cities like Rome, Florence, Venice live thanks and above all to a foreign tourism that has been absent for too long and there are travel agencies and tour operators who have a product exclusively focused on these markets, so it is complicated, if not impossible, to diversify ”Says the president of Fiavet.
“The risk of selling off ours tourist heritage foreign multinationals are just around the corner – says the president – the bans require us to reflect on the consequences of these choices “. The president of Fiavet points out to the institutions that even the UN is expressing itself in this sense. L’World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has, in fact, just welcomed the request from the World Health Organization (WHO) to lift or relax travel restrictions. “It is now clear that travel restrictions are not effective in suppressing the international spread of the virus as the WHO has declared in recent days – says Jelinic – it is the same WHO that in the last meeting in Geneva noted that the health limitations can cause economic and social damage “.
Arrivals of tourists international worldwide, they plummeted by 73% in 2020, falling to levels not seen in 30 years. And while tourism experienced a modest improvement in the third quarter of 2021, international arrivals between January and September 2021 were still 20% below 2020 levels and 76% below 2019 levels (UNWTO data). . “If we do not open up to all foreigners and in particular to the Russian and Asian market, other competing countries will do so – concludes the president Fiavet – and in addition to losing points in the classification world of tourism we will lose the opportunity of a sustainable recovery integrated with that of the rest of the world ”.