Numbers. Ten years of Tourism Investigation in Alghero.

The knowledge of the tourism phenomenon from the theoretical and qualitative point of view is more and more detailed and rich, while in quantitative and practical measurements it is always lacking. Advances in theoretical... [ view full abstract ]

The knowledge of the tourism phenomenon from the theoretical and qualitative point of view is more and more detailed and rich, while in quantitative and practical measurements it is always lacking. Advances in theoretical research show every time huge gaps in the collected data on tourism.
Existing investigations are almost always partial or incomplete, the data are difficult to access or have a delayed access in time.
Ten years ago, to improve the knowledge of the phenomenon in Alghero (SS), the Department of Architecture, Design and Urbanism of the University of Sassari (DADU) has started ATOSS, an observatory about tourism. The approach of ATOSS is thinking about tourism as an urban and territorial process.
We try to assess the submerged size of the tourism phenomenon both on the supply side (specifically the size of the receptive target with deep analisys on second homes) and on the demand side (the real number of arrivals and overnights).
The survey was carried out using standard methods, repeated year after year, which serve to "investigate" tourisms and tourists, and depth methodologies, different for each year, designed to discover who are the tourists, where they stay, what they do, how low-cost flights influence the tourism, how many are the excursionists and how much count the second homes in the tourism system.
In ten reports ATOSS noted that tourism is constantly changing, putting more and more emphasis on the need for continuous observation, close to the phenomenon, both spatially and temporally.
The tourism’s changes has been affected both with respect to global factors (web use for the holiday’s organization, low cost flights, price of marine transportation and the global economic crisis) and local ones (the relevant B&B’s growth, the waterfront and the city walls requalification, the DADU was founded, a Natural Park and a Marine Protected Area become operational).
To continue building information and policies would be necessary not only an observatory, but a system of observatories, able to ensure both a detailed knowledge of the local systems, and a large area of ​​vision, which is necessary for broader policies.