25 - Lucia Groe, "Narratives on Experiential Tourism in Calabria" (2025)
1. Introdution
This work reports the final results of a research activity entitled Eco-experiential paths and revitalization of tourism sustainability in high natural value areas of the Calabria Region which was carried out at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria in Italy in the period 01/02/2020 to 31/01/2023. The research presented fall within the scope of the study of experiential tourism as an alternative and innovative way of redesigning the Calabrian tourist offer. The analysis was conducted starting with the reflection on the new spaces in which the new tourisms operate and that lead the researcher to confront an increasingly dynamic scenario in which new research opportunities emerge, above all in the field of politics and planning tourist.
Groe Lucia lucia.groe@unical.it
1Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Calabria, Via Roberto Mirabelli, 89/B, 87032 Amantea, CS, Italy
The term new spaces as written by Dredge and Jenkins (2016) is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate a series of non-traditional and sometimes non-explicit spaces, in which discussions, exchange of information and decisions take place.
In the context of these tourist spaces, the emotional and educational dimensions increasingly occupy a significant role as characterizing tourist experiences and which push the researcher of socio-economic disciplines to make incursions into other disci-plinary fields to find, and add suitable toolst o those ones already in use, for: (a) synthe-sizing, communicating and explaining the practice of planning and making policy, and
(b) tracing new key elements of the process of social construction of tourism knowl-edge. Stories are one of the most used approaches in recent years. In this work, the stroytelling approach was adopted to investigate the sense of experiential tourism. The stories told and lived (experienced) try to interpret events, develop understanding of practices, shed light on a complicated system of relationships, build that social space within which tourism acts which is made up of ideas, collaborations, collisions, con-flicts and negotiations.
Starting from the idea of travel based not so much on the destination, but rather on human relationships, the analysis conducted was aimed at reading and interpreting the organization, governance and tourism policies.
The objectives of the research work were essentially two:
Analysis of the experiential tourism as meta-concept
Analysis of the tourism policy making process
Specifically, with a multidisciplinary approach, I have tried to:
Make explicit the interconnection between politics and tourism in order to deeply investigate human and territorial (natural) spaces. The analysis did not fall only on the socio-economic and environmental dimension (resources), but also on the psychologi-cal one, taking into account behaviors and motivations;
Deepen the study of a tourist destination starting from the (experiential) tourist quality of the territory with a focus on the primary (attractiveness) and secondary (fruition, experience and filia) codes that constitute it.
Enter into the strategic processes of tourism programming and planning and to propose experientiality as an anthropic and natural element for the creation of routes capable of relaunching tourism sustainability in areas of high natural value.
The impact of the covid-19 pandemic on research activities has redirected methodo-logical practice. The provisions for the health emergency did not allow the normal per-formance of the planned Computer-assisted Telephone Interviewing activities (CATI) at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria.
The administration of a questionnaire constructed for the collection of opinions on tourism policy and on the promotion strategies of an integrated and experiential policy had to face an important limitation encountered during the preliminary survey phase (pilot survey), carried out on a sample particularly narrow, in order to obtain the infor-mation necessary to organize the main investigation. I was able to see the low participa-tion of the sample due to a double aspect: the psychological discomfort imposed by the effects of the covid-19 pandemic and the direct closure of many businesses, the limita-tions imposed and the uncertainty about bookings.
The survey needed to continue and for this reason I have decided to organize a quali-tative study focusing on new forms of research: webinars supplemented by in-depth interviews.
As an unexpected result, a group of social actors was informally formed which I called collaborative group and which highlighted the need to reinterpret a tourism marked by the changes produced by the coronavirus.
Through the narratives of different levels of experience and expertise, the collaborative group was able to focus on policy making, in other words on evidence-based decision-making (Table 1).
The operational outline of the research work supported by the qualitative survey, in accordance with the guidelines of the Call, took into account the:
Identification of the main actors directly involved in experiential and sustainable tour-ism, both locally and nationally;
Creation of a cognitive framework of experiential and sustainable tourism within the dynamics of the Italian market and new development scenarios;
Identification of best practices related to the promotion of experiential and sustainable tourism, both at local, national and European level;
Mapping of the main experiential and sustainable tourism destinations;
Collection and analysis of data on the main sustainable services of tourist reception and on the dimensions of the phenomenon in the regional context;
Analysis of the role of EU, national and regional public policies,
The analysis conducted was aimed, in its practical implications, to the promotion of experiential paths capable on the one hand of relaunching tourism sustainability in areas of high natural value of the Calabria Region and on the other of innovating the tourist offer. The results achieved express that creating experiential paths means creating experiential value and it is necessary that they are designed and organized in such a way as to overcome the traditional logic of segmentation. The promotion and consequent planning of experien-tial itineraries must necessarily be preceded by an analytical and empirical phase of study which become relevant for a particular segment of tourism. The idea of experiential paths tends to get the operators organized around a project based on listening actions. To be more specific, the innovative tourism segment welcomes an approach that has gone from aes-thetic, cultural, emotional, participatory to experiential.