Foreigners and art cities do well The challenge now is to keep Italian tourists on the shores

Summer tourism in Tuscany? 'It will be driven by international demand and cities of art'. So predicts the Centre for Tourism Studies (Cst) of Florence in the survey carried out (between 20 and 27 May) for the regional agency Toscana Promozione, interviewing 535 tourism entrepreneurs. But if foreigners, who had already pushed the recovery last year, will be the locomotive of the 2024 summer (reaching 52% of the flows), Tuscany - from the height of its 'brand' made of picture-postcard landscapes, delightful villages, cities of art, spas and sea - finds itself questioning a crucial aspect: how to retain Italian tourists, especially seaside tourists, attracted by other destinations and, above all, by more competitive prices.

"The cost of tourist services has not stopped," explains Gianfranco Lorenzo of the Centre for Tourism Studies, "and these increases are changing the geography of flows, because they are better absorbed by the purchasing power of visitors from the cities of art and the countryside, while in seaside resorts the expectations of cgrowth are downsized. The bet made by Tuscany to succeed in retaining Italian tourists, who arrived on its coasts from outside the region during the Covid 2020-2021 summers, is therefore in danger of being lost. "In most of the region's territories, it will be international tourists who will compensate for the weaker Italian demand, and will have a positive impact on the entire regional economic system," says Cts.

In the first five months of 2024 tourist presences in Tuscany rose by 4.2%, while arrivals were up 4.6%. Smaller variations are expected for the June-August quarter, with estimates of +1% in presences and +1.2% in arrivals, although last-minute bookings could improve the expected results.

Last year, the region reached 14.6 million arrivals (+13%) and almost 46 million presences (+7%), which, however, have not yet made it possible to recover pre-Covid levels (compared to 2019 the gap is 5%). This year the goal is to return to that level, even if there is a growing conviction that tourist presences cannot be the only yardstick for assessing the sector's performance, quite the contrary: in Florence (which accounts for half of Tuscany's tourism), now overcrowded and grappling with overtourism for a large part of the year, the debate today is how to limit the tourist onslaught and how to improve the city's liveability for residents.