The inside‐out gear — How to monitor the impact of accommodation evolution on demand choice in Heritage cities

Studies on the impact of tourism in art cities underlined that many cities begun to suffer too many costs because of mass tourism. The problem of costs/benefits balance was in some case further complicated by the quick increase in a peculiar kind of excursionists — the so called false excursionists. Their increase is in fact joined with the spreading around the city of “alternative” accommodations. But false excursionists bring to the destination more costs and less benefits than traditional tourism, as a relevant part of their budget is spent where they are lodging. Thus, this sort of tourism “development” calls for visitors management policies able to reduce costs and maximize the tourism benefits for the city. But these policies require a deep understanding of the relationship between demand and accommodation supply, and between accommodations within and outside the city. And, more important, a continuous monitoring on how these relationships change in time, and why. Pricing and product strategies put into effect by accommodations, joined with changes in the demand behaviour, are in fact the basic variables of a mechanisms that might eventually lead to a substantial increase in false excursionists number and a stagnation in overnight tourists demand, with major consequences on the cost/benefits ratio for the art city as a whole. Aim of this paper is to introduce a set of 10 indicators and, through their application on the Venice situation, show how they can be used to analyze on diachronic terms the impact of accommodation evolution on demand choice.