Tourism, a share of the tourist tax for video surveillance in municipalities

There were three key points on the closing day of the International Tourism Forum: work on the undertourism front to develop the Peninsula's lesser-known inland areas; the sector's transition to full-fledged industry, while up to now it has been included in the tertiary sector, among services; and security, with the intervention of Matteo Piantedosi, Minister of the Interior, together with Daniela Santanchè, Minister of Tourism, signed the Amalfi Charter with the mayors of some localities with strong tourist pressure. The Charter includes a commitment to strengthen multi-level coordination in the management, sustainability and security of tourist flows and the protection of the most exposed territories.

Emanuele Orsini, president of Confindustria, responded to Daniela Santanchè's requests, including that of considering tourism an industry for all intents and purposes, with a video intervention: 'The challenge is to make the people arriving from abroad stay more and more in our territory, but also to manage to ensure that the concentrations we have in the big cities can also be brought to the villages, and on this it will be crucial to work on infrastructure. We need a tourism industrial plan,' the president stressed. I agree with Minister Santanchè's policy proposals on tourism, which cannot just be seen as a service, but instead considered as an industry in its own right. All the proposals made, from taxation to training, point to the right path. Confindustria has generated a delegation for tourism for the first time precisely because for us the supply chain behind it is fundamental. I am thinking of agribusiness, manufacturing, culture, services, and infrastructure, which are fundamental to making our system work'.

Speaking on Mercosur, President Orsini called 'the vote of the past few days very short-sighted. I believe that the capacity for reciprocity is fundamental and to close oneself off is short-sighted. I expect that after Mercosur there can be India we must increase the markets of Saudi Arabia, I think it is fundamental. Regarding the divisions that have also emerged in Italy over whether to sign the trade agreement with South American countries, Orsini emphasised that 'here one has to put the general interest of the country before one's own interests'.

On the second point, Domenico Pellegrino, president of Aidit. the Italian tourism distribution association that is a member of Federturismo Confindustria, recalls how 'many of the guidelines presented yesterday by the government coincide with a vision that Aidit has been pursuing for years with consistency and a sense of responsibility. This confirms that organised tourism, when it dialogues with the institutions in a serious and structured manner, can make a decisive contribution to the construction of modern and effective industrial policies'.

With regard to security, a key factor in the perception of those who have to choose a holiday destination, Piantedosi referring to the forces of law and order said: "We are planning to recover the workforce. There has been a problem of underestimation on the part of political forces of the past, governments of the past have been participants in dastardly policies and now they are among the opposition's main witnesses - as far as tomorrow is concerned, the Minister of the Interior anticipates -. We are planning support for technological instruments such as video surveillance". On the subject, the minister adds: "We are working with Minister Piantedosi to include in the new decree a rule that allows municipalities to allocate part of the proceeds of the tourist tax to financing the installation of video surveillance systems. This is a concrete measure of attention to the territories and a targeted use of public resources to ensure the security of cities, which are increasingly popular destinations for tourists from all over the world". It is essential security against petty crime because 'it is a central element of our tourism promotion strategy: it is no coincidence that Italy ranks first in Europe in terms of perception of security among tourists, ahead of Greece, France and Spain'.