Sardinia Tourism

Overview:

In Sardinia tourism was an important part of its economy and being known for its summer locality faced low occupancy in the off seasons. Italian tour company Portale Sardegna launched their new product Open Voucher in order to extend the tourist season on the island of Sardinia. They developed a network of hotels that would provide rooms year round as well as travel arrangements offered through their Open Voucher packages for low prices. Early on the product was showing good signs in the market place, but starting in 2007 results began to decline.

Issues:

• Sardinia being known for its beaches faced the problem of seasonality, meaning there would not be much activity outside of the summer months.

• Even though the Open Voucher team wanted to have a wide range of well-placed hotel selections they failed to achieve this because they focused on low cost flights that landed primarily in the north. As a result they had trouble getting hotel affiliation in the Cagliari market located in the south and tourists were concentrated in the north.

• The company also lacked a working and appropriate IT infrastructure early on.

Lessons Learned:

• Portale Sardegna should have made sure they got coverage in the south like they originally planned. The graphs show that there are many more passengers arriving in Cagliari (south) airport than in Olbia (north) airport during the off-season months. Even though people arriving in Cagliari are primarily business travelers, packages could have been built around them in order to boosts sales.

• The company relied too heavily on its partnership with HLX and once it became Tuifly the Open Voucher product began to suffer. They should have established partnerships with other companies