The TTG Travel Experience travel mart held in conjunction with SIA Hospitality Design and SUN Beach & Outdoor Style in Rimini, Italy, from October 12-14, 2022, closed with figures under the banner of excellence – 25% more professional visitors than in 2021.
The response of the global market attending the 59th edition of TTG, along with the 71st SIA and 40th SUN, confirms that vacations are the new commodity. Trade professionals are once more creating value in line with travelers’ new expectations in both the leisure and business sectors.
The success of the 2022 edition of the Italian Exhibition Group’s expos confirms that travel is an asset in which people invest, because it generates cultural richness, physical wellness, and personal growth, and it does so in an immediate manner and without constraints – ”Unbound” – as was the theme chosen for 2022. Success was also confirmed by the extraordinary media visibility of the appointment, which, between radio, TV, online, and off-line media, exceeded 260 million gross contacts.
IEG’s ability to attract the professional community put over 200 events at its disposal with 250 speakers hosted in 7 arenas – from the use of digital technologies and the Metaverse to space travel at Vision +23, the flagship event for learning the new languages of the consumer market.
Italy shines
A thousand foreign buyers from 50 countries, mainly from the USA, United Kingdom, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, South America, and Canada, were at the IEG international tourism expo and decreed on the incoming front interest in art cities, omenala, wine and food, active tourism, and the luxury sector in Italy, with 20 regions of Italy participating in the Rimini Expo Centre’s halls. These buyers confirmed a high consent for the Salento, Apulia, Southern Italy destination. The Italian tour operators produced their travel offers which included foreign and Italian destinations for the winter 2022-23 season.
Among the stands of the 60 foreign destinations, travel agents and tour operators once more found in the Italian market a boost for the next medium- and long-range winter season, above all towards locations with warmer climates, as well as to Italy’s mountains resorts. Success was found from “south working,” which confirms the success of the regions of Southern Italy with foreign buyers, to “daybreak” in European cities or discovering unique itineraries based on food experiences to meet new cultures with Jordan the partner country of TTG 2022.
Along with the most representative trade associations, including Federalberghi and all the sectors represented by Confturismo (the Tourism Confederation), ASTOI (Association of Italian Tour operators) FTO (the association of Italian Tour Operators), FAITA (Federcamping, SIB, Fiavet, Assoviaggi), CNA Assopiscine (the swimming pool association), as well as institutional partner ENIT, all the regions of Italy, ISNART from the world of research, Milan Polytechnic, and market analysts CNR, IEG put together a calendar of meetings with a high profile at the scientific and professional level to understand and imagine new proposals of travel on the retail circuit.
Overall success confirmed
With 2,200 brands exhibiting, TTG, SIA, and SUN confirmed their roles as the leading communication platform in Italy for incoming and outgoing travel which benefitted from 2 factors.
The first is that the drop in attendance in hospitality facilities stopped at 7% compared to 2019, thanks to the positive performance of the summer quarter (according to data fromFederalberghi – the Italian Hotel Federation).
The second is the “skin change” that tourism underwent after the pandemic, bringing new ways of experiencing vacations to the attention of the travel and hospitality industries.
Above all, the “workation” phenomenon, i.e. vacations based on the profile of workers who move their workplace to a different city, was evident.
Concurrent expos
At the 71st edition of SIA, the outdoors and glamping as a high-quality hospitality offer was confirmed. Dating from the 40th edition of SUN, Salento was rewarded for the quality of its beach facilities. SIA Hospitality Design was characterized by the entrance, for the first time, of the outdoor tourism chain, increasingly close to hotels as far as standard furniture and accommodation facilities are concerned. A trend that of the convergence of hotel hospitality and the world of camping and glamping that highlighted by the agreement of collaboration was inked by IEG and FAITA Federcamping and which was represented in great depth by The Ne[s]t´ exhibition, dedicated precisely to the glamping sector. (deluxe mobile accommodations).
SUN Beach&Outdoor Style offered visitors a program full of new features for enterprises and bathing establishments from design to set-up, furnishings and fittings, technologies, and innovative solutions to the sector’s latest trends. Among the events on the busy calendar were the “Best Beach 2022, the Oscars of Italian beaches” awards ceremony by Mondo Balneare (Bathing World). Establishments receiving the award were Marina Marittima’s Lido Ficò in Salento, the best bathing establishment of the summer of 2022, and Lido Addaura in Palermo, as the best designed facility.
