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.

 

 

2. Research objectives and theoretical framework

The analysis on experiential tourism was conducted taking into account a theoretical framework which includes various contributions. One of the first steps taken in the analysis was to read and interpret the experiential tourism as relation, as meeting with the other, then the attention was on the relationship between practices and space,finally the analysis went into the storytelling of both experiences and regulations and (tourist) political lines.

Experiential tourism must be read and analyzed within the Relationship Paradigm (Bar-rett-Lennard 2013).

The author considers the human condition as an intertwined tapestry of multi-level relationships and that, traditionally, the relationship implies connection, exchange between individuals or groups, where each is aware of the other. This includes relationships within

 

 

 

 

 

Table 1 Collaborative group

ActorsRoleDetails

Local operatorsAssociations, Cooperatives, villages, tour operators,etc.They offer experiential performances with direct immersive events,

They use a storytelling approach

 

Regional tourist DistrictsRegulatory tool for the aggregation of territories with potential tour-

ist attractions expressed in a homogeneous and complementary way

Local action groupsGroups made up of public and private entities operating in rural

areas

They have the objective of redeveloping and relaunching the tourist offer

 

They accompany the tourist operators in the integrated planning of the territory

 

Territorial organizationsTerritorial collaborative formsThey support important processes of co-construction of a tourist offer proposal

Natural Parks and tourist guides National and/or regional entitiesThey support experientiality through services

 

Institutions and expertiseRegional entities that operate on several levels of different levels of

government and expertness, scholars, etc.

They support the debate on experiential tourism with studies, data and research

 

Source: author elaboration, 2023

 

the self, interpersonal relationships, relationships between and within communities, organizations, and nations, and relationships with animals.

The author describes the relationship as a bridge between lives, an exchange of feelings, stories, ideas, intentions and actions. A bridge that unites people-islands that stand out in their being.

The relationship looks at the other and becomes a place to live an experience.

The tourist experience in this work is read through the concept of meeting with the other different from me and with the border. Current society redesigns space where it becomes difficult to conceptualize the border beyond which otherness is placed.

The practice of tourism sets in motion cultures and identities that enter into a relation-ship with each other and with others. This practice clashes with the hyper-individualistic atomism and the need to build the foundations of a new sociality that recognizes the obli-gations that derive from relating to each other. (Cesareo 2004).

In a context where experience is what builds the relationship between the subjects (tour-ist and host community) it is important that there are no barriers to hinder the methods of interaction, for this reason the border here is not intended as an obstacle, but it is inter-preted in terms of porosity, of the possibility of exchange between identity and difference, between inside and outside. Bion (1961) argued that the boundary is a boundary only if it is porous.

The porosity allows transit, allows listening to the foreigner’s experience. The foreigner who crosses the porous border is not only the human subject of another nation, he is also the unconscious, the shadow that is inside everyone. If the border becomes a barrier and the defenses are raised, life ceases to be such and leaves room for imposition, panic con-trol, avoidance, loss of the sense of I am because you are. If Relationship Paradigm shows human dimension in the explanation of experiential tourism, the concept of place focus the analysis about relations system with the territory and the community.

Starting from the concept of place, it is shown that tourist practices are strongly inter-twined with spaces. They are altered, consumed, valued or protected spaces; isolated spaces or integrated with those ones usually used by the residents of the host community. The force of tourism acts on places by ensuring that the dialectic between the organized system of tourism, the socio-cultural and the environmental one is enriched with new elements of adaptation and mitigation. A dialectic aimed at starting an organizational and planning pro-cess worked towards at revolutionizing the tourist offer, not surprisingly Simonicca (2004) writes: “tourism […] is hinged on everyday life.”

Space, respect to tourism, can be read in terms of:

 

Process of territorialisation, ie attribution of values, symbols, meanings that define tourist attractiveness;

Identity (physical and socio-cultural), in terms of attractive resources, relationships, behaviours, culture and tradition;

Consumed/used space, in terms of transformation that produces the denomination of new tourism spaces.

 

The evolution of tourism phenomenon shows more and more its new social implica-tions, and how the relations with element which constituite it are changed. One of the elements which helps us to read this kind of new relation are the new spaces. The new spaces of tourism are a clear expression of new tourisms. New spaces are areas of analy-sis in which new concepts and new tourist knowledge are carried out. New concepts on experiences are linked to more marginal territorial areas that become new tourist

 

destinations, new forms of hospitality, new forms of planning and programmation and new forms of promo-marketing. These are the essential elements through which experi-ential tourism is made explicit.

The new tourism spaces are therefore read, interpreted and organized on the basis of:

 

The organizational capacity of the territory (physical data), ie the creation of tourist facilities;

The planning process, ie the personalization of tourist practices;

To the tourist competitiveness in the contexts, in terms of new policies and tools for management and planning and for tourism development.

 

The scientific debate around tourism highlights strong and deep transformations that the tourism phenomenon is experiencing. The dynamic evolution of tourist demand has a strong impact on tourist practices by increasingly enhancing the relational aspect, i.e. the one inherent in the relationships between people, things and places in which the practices take place.

The most recent studies show that the management of tourist resources and tourist spaces moves further and further away from the logic of mass tourism and increasingly aligns itself with new alternative approaches.

The possibility of building an alternative organizational and tourist management path to the mass one calls into question a series of much discussed opposites: tourists—resi-dents, free time—work time, vacation space—everyday space, attractive resources and their transformation into elements of tourism with a vision aimed at experientiality.

To fully understand the decision-making processes inherent in experiential tourism practices, it is necessary to understand what experience is and how it acts in the tourism sector.

The analysis of experience as an innovative way of redesigning the tourist offer is certainly not a novelty in the field of literature and tourism. For this reason experiential tourism, in this work, is explained in terms of meta-concept and not as a new concept.

In this particular case, the meta-concept of experiential tourism refers to the need to go beyond the meaning of experience we are used to. It means highlighting the transfor-mation, the change of the concept over time. Experiential, therefore, refers to the trans-formation of experiences and refers to a new way of organizing them. Re-organising experiences focuses on a new way of responding to the tourist social demand in terms of:

 

Structuring the experience in the tourist offer on the basis of new logics;

Interpreting the tourist’s request to live the experience not as a standardized tourist package, but as a memory and emotion to remember.

 

The ability of the tourist operators to enter a process of building an experiential path and to reveal what lies behind it plays a fundamental role on the interpretation of the requests. Caloggero (2022) referes to the tourist operator as an interpreter of the experiential prac-tice, and he writes: "The interpreter does not provide information but reveals the profound truth that is hidden behind appearances, the participant in an interpreting experience does not know but discovers”.

The reorganization of experience is not as simple as it may seem, because experiences are subjective and highly personal. They are in fact related to the aspect of perception, learning, memory, empathy and past participation in a particular event. Today, more and

 

more experiences meet the various aspects of tourism, making the management of the resulting products difficult and complicated.

Experience is not a new concept especially in the practices of sustainable tourism and slow and creative tourism of small destinations and villages, what is new is the way in which the experience-product allows you to experience the community, postponing the analysis to the more operational form of the transformation of experience (Groe 2022).

It presents itself as a strengthening of a motivation more oriented towards the human and relational dimension to the point of making it a phenomenon that by now we could define as mature, which has its specific place within the market and its important role in the political process. The latest sector reports (Expedia, Booking, Skift, Phocuswright, Tour-scanner, 2019; Altexsoft, American express, 2022) proclaim it as a global trend, such as that tourism capable of transforming small economies and accelerating post-covid restart responses. It would seem obvious to think that the path of enhancement and management of processes, direct or indirect, associated with experiential tourism is all downhill, but it is not like that, and it is not, above all for those small tourist realities that still do not have clear how to organize themselves for address the dynamism of tourism demand. It is unthinkable that good solutions are always rightly posed to answer every type of problem. Not always, in fact, good solutions in the wrong context will produce good results.

In the tourism sector, dealing with experience means turning to a new type of offer characterized by companies that create unique multisensory events, capable of allowing learning through direct participation and involving customers in a memorable way (Schmitt 1999; Pine and Gilmore 1999). The product/service-experience is representative of a new economy where demand is increasingly filled with the evolution of contents. Experiential tourism, therefore, means dealing with the evolutionary stages of tourist demand.

In this work, the analysis of experiential tourism is enriched with multidisciplinary the-oretical contributions, both in the economic and marketing fields and in the psycho-social field.

The analysis is actually characterized by different levels of study which are shown below:

 

Concept of tourist experience

Concept of human relations

Concept of meeting with the other as the fulcrum of the tourist experience

Concept of organizing a tourist experience.

 

The authors Pine and Gilmore (1999) argue that “ experiences represent a kind of eco-nomic product that already exists but has not yet been articulated […] and that recognizing them as a new economic offer provides the key to understanding future economic growth”. The companies that will be able to respond adequately to this change will be the eco-nomic forces able to control the product and create new economic value, but not all com-panies will be able to do so, many of them will leave the sector, especially those which will continue to be limited to the product and/or service. For this reason, companies will have

to become directors of experiences and stage them in a memorable way.

Experience, in the vision of Pine and Gilmore (1999), allows us to overcome the con-cept of standardization of the product. It clashes with the tendency of advanced industrial societies to uniform and standardize the standard of living, the behavior and the attitudes of the individuals of a social community.

So, experience is a broad concept that lends itself to different definitions that can be found in different disciplinary fields. It is usual to find this concept above all in the

 

economic and marketing literature, linking it in a particular way to the offer category. In fact, we often speak of experiential marketing considering, in this case, the experience as instrumental to the provision of services or the sale of products, and of experiential offer when it itself is the object of an offer. However, the experience also extends to other areas that particularly concern learning and emotion, this allows us to understand that experience accompanies every human action and allows us to focus attention on the individual, on his cognitive, emotional and spiritual abilities. Shifting attention to the individual, in tourism, means shifting attention to the tourist, also called consumer or guest. Therefore, a tourism based on strategies aimed at promoting an experiential tourist offer, of a specific tourist destination, allows us to think about the design processes of the offer with a consumer-centric approach, i.e. shifting the attention from the product to the consumer, to its needs, its needs and its necessities.

In recent times, more and more tourist experiences are not only analyzed as new rela-tionships, and as a new way of relating to the place, but also as stories to be told to enter and touch the most empathic and emotional part of the tourist.

Social scientists have different analytical approaches and tools at their disposal to tell tourism, but in this paper I will look at storytelling.

Why exactly storytelling? Why stories matter, not only in the explication of expereince in a specific destination, in the identification process with the place, in the building of rela-tions, but also in the tourism policy-making. Because every law, every policy guideline, every policy advice is a narrative. (Lowndes 2016).

Fiction offers new forms of discovery and opportunity, it is a sequence of events, expe-riences and actions with a story that holds the different parts together into a meaningful whole.

To understand the role of narrative and storytelling aimed at supporting the decision-making process, it is necessary to understand the tourism regulatory environment at the various levels of operation.

Tourism is a complex field of study that cannot easily be placed in a single theoretical and methodological framework. The interdisciplinary approach captures and analyzes ele-ments that in the overall analysis pose a clearer and more detailed overall picture. This is dictated by the reason according to which tourism was mainly conceived and studied as an economic phenomenon and therefore initially falling within the scope of economic-statis-tical disciplines. The observation of the phenomenon, in fact, made it possible to measure and evaluate, in a particular way, the flows, the expenditure, the induced activities of a given area, the life cycle of a tourist destination, until it was realized that, such analyses, failed to envelop and analyze the social implications of the phenomenon.

But tourism is also and above all a social fact. It is a phenomenon that changes and evolves continuously, and it is therefore necessary to understand its implications outside the economic-statistical contexts. Attention therefore shifts to its origins, to its environ-mental and socio-cultural impacts, to the motivations and needs of tourists that feed a changing tourist demand to which the tourist offer struggles to respond in a timely manner.

Storytelling is considered the art of narrating. Tourist storytelling is the art of narrating or communicating a tourist destination. The storytelling technique is based on the story technique, the one in which the tourist identifies and feels part of the story. It is a personal approach because it is aimed at people and moves emotions and sensations.

The authors D’Errico and D’Errico (2022) referring to the emotional aspect of (calabrian) tourism say that the places have a soul and it is up to us to discover it in tourist and knowledge trips.

Paragraph 3 of this paper will show how tourist experiences are told and organized.

 

3. Methodology

The survey work involved two distinct methodological phases: a quantitative phase and a subsequent qualitative one.

The quantitative phase was based on Computer Aided Telephone Interview surveys. The questionnaire was prepared for the analysis of tourism policy and strategies for pro-moting an integrated and experiential policy starting from three macro areas of analysis:

 

Opinions and attitudes of the various actors on tourism with a focus on the regional and provincial one;

Opinions and attitudes of the various actors on public policies to support regional tour-ism;

Opinions and attitudes of the various actors on local tourist resources and on the pre-disposition of the tourist offer to integrate experientiality in their performances and proposals.

 

But the covid-19 pandemic has affected the empirical phase from the earliest stages. The complexity caused by the circulation of the virus has affected the ability to par-ticipate and the usability of the scarce information obtained. Therefore, I faced with an unexpected event that required a change in the path of research.

Thus, a cycle of webinars was organized with the aim of reflecting and confronting the growing affirmation of experience as a tourist product in such a way as to:

 

Promote co-planning,

Stimulate the dissemination of skills,

Create network and organizational relationships

 

in the Calabrian territory.

Webinars have become a very useful investigative tool in the covid-19 pandemic. Their ability to break down physical barriers and connect participants in a simple and immediate way has made them an effective essential communication tool.

The various meetings made it possible to probe, with more opportunities for in-depth analysis, topics included in the Computer Aided Telephone Interview questionnaire.

The cycle of webinars organized as a narrative has allowed the narration of the ter-ritory, best practices and governance processes to emerge. Webinars have taken on the role of a valid tool in guiding the offer:

 

In the search for the experience, starting from territorial identities, which best responds to the needs and requirements of new tourists;

In soliciting and tickling the tourist’s decision to choose that particular destination over another,

In memory of the emotion to be left to the tourist.

 

The webinar cycle was characterized by 5 weekly meetings and they addressed differ-ent aspects of the phenomenon.

Three macro-areas have animated discussions and reflections:

 

The tourist legislation, in this meeting the strengths and weaknesses of the national and regional regulatory instruments were discussed;

Regional tourist districts and other forms of regional and territorial organisations, the focus was on Calabrian experiences,those ones mature and in the process of being established. The focus has fallen on legislative processes and forms of bot-tom-up socio-economic responses.

The best practices of experiential tourism in Calabria, with analysis of known practices and of those ones which, although not part of organized forms of tourism, are excellent examples to be valorised.

 

A final and summary Conference entitled Experiential tourism in Calabria. A pos-sible system? has closed the first empirical phase.

The Conference was characterized by the organization of 3 Sessions:

 

I Session—Experiential tourism: prospects for a territorial-environmental govern-ance

II Session—Experiential tourism: new tourist spaces and integrated programming

III Session—Experiential tourism: a possible system?

 

and a Round Table that allowed for a broader debate and confrontation with social actors.

After this phase it has started an in-depth interviews phase that it allowed to deepen phenomena, concepts, tourist practices and policies.

In both events (webinars and Conference) the narration was adopted for two orders of reasons:

 

For a methodological issue, because experiential tourism can be read through the storytelling approach,

For a conceptual and communicative issue, because narratives allow experiences to be communicated, to involve the community through a story that is told. A story steeped in identity, traditions, territories, practices. The essence of storytelling is that when you tell stories you operate and the intent of this work is to operate.

 

The twofold result of this research project was:

 

Re-designing the Calabrian tourist offer starting from a planning centered on an idea of territorial governance,

Encourage the formation of eco-experiential paths capable of enhancing some natural areas located outside the tourist circuits, but also of promoting and marketing sustain-able forms of use.

 

The identification of privileged witnesses and stakeholders, who in fact constituted the working group, took place thanks to an initial recognition of the documents, on the one hand, and on the territory, on the other, using the snowball method first, and a stakeholder mapping,then.

The tourism operators who enlivened the research activities confronted each other through a storytelling approach and formed a collaborative group.

 

4. Results

The collaborative group

 

The research path was tackled with an interdisciplinary analysis which showed interrela-tionships between social and managerial, psychological and geographical, political and cultural studies. The interdisciplinary approach has made it possible to narrate the territo-rial identities and experiences, the organizational needs based on the idea of a governance that relaunches cooperation and collaboration between public and private, in which the leadership must be assumed by the DMO—Destination Management Organization.

Even if it was a research space built on the triple helix system (scientific community, organizations and public institutions) the real protagonists were the tourism operators and their practices.

In this work the narratives offered contexts through which a group of people (social actors) worked together to find cohesion, balance, team spirit and collective identity.

Collaborative storytelling is to be understood as organizational change. What does this mean?

The group has not only given itself the possibility of making visible what is contained in each other’s experiences, but also of creating something and achieving a common goal.

The stories narrated, those representative of political, organizational, cultural dimen-sions, are not without biographical elements, conflicts and memories and it is precisely this authentic characteristic that has made it possible to:

 

Bring out the contributions of each individual;

Enhance openness of people and practices;

Achieve goals and share results;

Focus on the speed of decision-making power;

Establish relationships.

 

The collaborative group was managed according to a 5-step process called the 5 Rs of productive meetings of Starhawk (2011) which gave the various operators of different lev-els of expertise the opportunity to deal with each other in a completely fair way, eliminat-ing the hierarchical.

The 5 Rs of the productive meetings that allowed to organize the group’s activities were:

 

Right People—it refers to people, it represents who is part of the group;

Right Container—it refers to the frame, the setting, it represents how the meeting is structured in terms of space and duration. It is a sort of metaphor for the social order.

Right process—it refers to the ways in which a group can operate. A group can operate in terms of open space or consensus building. Open space provides an opportunity to discuss and generate ideas, but not to make decisions or set priorities. The latter ones are decided in the process of building consensus, even if for the research group it is more correct to say that it was an operational confrontation, i.e. co-creation.

Right Facilitation—it refers to the consent facilitator, in this case the facilitator was represented by various figures operating in the research field: the scientific referent and the research fellow assisted by the support of the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria, which in fact have set up spaces and contents for comparison.

•  

Right Agenda—it refers to the agenda necessary for structuring spaces, interventions, for selecting critical issues and potentials to discuss.

 

The purpose of the group was to activate a pro-social process aimed at creating a sense of us with respect to the interests of the individual. In other words, cooperate to create a collective us.

Each member knowingly sacrificed himself by giving up a certain amount of power to achieve mutual benefit.

Thus, the vision initiated the activities of the group.

The vision represents the image of the world that one wants to create. A well-framed vision increases creativity, passion and interests. Above all, a vision embodies values that allow (tourism operators) to accept challenges and face them.

It is precisely those shared values which, by becoming a bond, lead to conceptualiz-ing the vision at a higher and more spiritual level, I would add.

For the analysed group, it all started with an intention:

 

More centered than a general vision;

Wider than a purpose.

 

An intention projected towards the change that was able to:

 

Share a common vision of tourism;

Stimulate the co-planning;

Create forms of collaboration to promote territorial governance aimed at managing the planning of an integrated tourist offer.

 

The collaborative group highlights elements of a starfish organisation (Brafman and Beckstrom, 2008):

 

The group was not hierarchically structured, rather it was structured as a circle;

The group was made up of peers;

In the group there was an absence of a formal authority, and finally

The group’s actions created as a collective result the activation of a common vision which incorporates all the values of the group aimed at creating a bond.

 

Each social actor involved in the analysis made it possible to photograph a part of the (mature or in the process of being implemented) tourism reality. Through the narrative of their experiences and practices they have made explicit what I have called coordi-nates of the goodness of the experience, that is to say they have allowed us to identify in the areas of reference:

 

Purely experiential practices,

Building processes of territorial organizations,

Actors who support experientiality through services.

 

The purely experiential practices include those which not only experiment, but which validate the idea of tourist as local and temporary citizen which refer to the delicate concept of an enlarged community, those practices which, as Curti (2021) writes, lead

 

the tourist to “a drastic change from visiting to feeling part of living”. These experi-ences are aimed above all at protecting the place and its identity by not altering its spirit and essence. The purpose of these experiences is not to lose the authenticity of the place in the mechanisms of mass tourism.

The collaborative group has highlighted that a new tourism policy must be character-ized by a series of elements in order to pass from a theoretical dimension, made up of statements, to one of implementation and realization. Elements that allow change are: (a) the activation and management of organizational change, (b) the development of networks of organizations, (c) territorial strategic planning which aims to create sharing and consen-sus on long-term programs of change on a territory and generates forms of participatory governance (Perulli 2004). The change in experience design requires advanced models for managing complexity. The tourist experience is a continuous process, without interrup-tions, and it must be designed from a systemic perspective.

The change therefore takes place, if one conceives, realizes and implements a:

 

Multilevel planning, to promote cooperation between institutions, businesses and peo-ple for transformation;

Participation and enablement of stakeholders in planning, innovation and change.

 

It was a research in which daimons were implicitly and explicitly spoken of, especially tourism daimons, in the context of the genius loci, that is, that model of life inscribed in our soul that is shared and which responds to a certain spirituality present in the places. In terms of community, that inner will of cultivating and implementing every day with coherence and courage the vocation of a small village, of a green area that goes beyond the human need to personify spaces and objects. Vocation understood as heritage, as authenticity.

The analysis of experiential tourism that emerged from the narratives highlights that it is increasingly becoming an option of choice after the covid-19 pandemic. A tourism that focuses attention on small destinations and that leads the tourist to experience the holi-day rather than spend it. It is a tourism that would attract the attention of the international dimension.

Calabria suffers the effects of a long legal-administrative history of seaside tourism justified by the fact that it has over 700 km of coastline, representing in fact the Italian region with the maximum coastal development (Fera and Ziparo 2014). Calabria is a predominantly mountainous area even if it is perceived essentially for its coastal strip. The tourist offer and communication was focused almost exclusively on the sea product, activating projects located most of the time on the coasts and absorbing growth prospects from the more inland areas, showing a very high seasonality of the seaside tourist flow, mainly in the summer months. The Calabrian tourism system presents typical elements of a spontaneous tourism development model, which is born. Around an easily exploitable natural attractive resource. Despite this, companies have been able, over the years, to offer only the minimum accessory services and exploitation of the marine resource (Mammì and Utizi 2017). Furthermore, the weak urban structure has affected the quality of services and infrastructures. (Fera and Ziparo 2014). The maturity of the seaside sector combined with the diffusion of a different motivation for travel than that of the sea has led to reconsidering other Calabrian resources. The Region is full of villages, green areas and rural areas ( the region is the only one in Italy that has three national parks on its territory) that must be read and analyzed in terms of relationship systems that promote changes in ecological and sustainable behaviors both from an information point of view, i.e. to increase knowledge

 

and awareness, and from a structural point of view, i.e. changing the circumstances in which decision-making behaviors are implemented.

What emerged in the various meetings was the step-by-step construction of a willing-ness to make a commitment to change behavior and to shift the importance of the tourism sector towards new forms of development, even if niche ones capable of soliciting sub-sidiarity horizontal. The new intent of the subjects of the Calabrian tourist offer is to go beyond the seaside and to build an undertourism destination, in other words that is not only characterized by a mechanism based on consumption, but centered on people and their places.

Authentic Calabria has much beyond the sea and fully satisfies the new demand for post-pandemic tourism that seeks the healthiness of places, non-crowding, the search for experiences rather than unique places, the possibility of living outdoors.

The Calabrians must realize that they are "authentic citizens" of an authentic region and not of a pre-established tourist product. This awareness must also be supported through a specific marketing action that no longer tells the story of Calabria but of the many authen-tic Calabrias with widespread stories. (Regione Calabria, 2023).

The collaborative group has allowed their stories to narrate tourism politics through evidence.

Policy is not something without stories, on the contrary it produces arguments capable of distinguishing good rhetoric from bad and of communicating the evidence.

Evidence assumes the fundamental role of persuading within a certain topic. Thus, nar-rative is constitutive of the political process and it is for this reason that evidence-based policy making is believed to have become the dominant paradigm.

The narrative is important in the policy making process for several reasons:

 

Because it brings value,

Because stories reflect or constitute identities,

Because it holds the keys to the agency,

Because when stories become institutionalized they contribute to political stability,

Because it is a resource of power,

Because narratives provide an intervention point in the decision-making process.

 

Narrative operates within politics in different ways and allows us to establish a frame-work for considering interventions (Lowndes 2016).

Starting from the work of Dodge et al. (2005) narrative can be distinguished in:

 

Narrative as knowledge,

Narrative as meaning,

Narrative as a metaphor.

 

Narrative as knowledge, write Dodge et al. (2005) is “seen as a way of knowing”. In other words, social actors think and learn through stories, as narratives are seen as contain-ers of knowledge.

Narrative as meaning is seen as a means of expression (Dodge et al. 2005). Social actors create and use stories to communicate meaning and reveal their own meaning-making processes.

Fiction as metaphor is seen as constituting, shaping human beings and not simply as a means to be used by them. Through fiction, deep social structures are glimpsed that are not visible to the naked eye.

 

The collaborative group reproduced a capable narrative within the three types of nar-rative discussed by Dodge et. al. (2005).

Experiential tourism has been presented by narratives and social actors experience as a phenomenon capable of going from the experience of the village to the luxury one, passing through mulberry and silkworm cultivation and the anthropological approach of a small town that is transformed into a laboratory of tradition. To experience the place along a journey (in connection with nature) by bicycle, to enter empathetically into the narration of a tourist guide, or to be an active part of the processing of a product such as oil and wine.

The interpretation key with which the various meetings were addressed, after the moti-vational explanation and the genius loci, was the tourism governance activity, a governance activity conceived as a system of relationships between organizations and institutions.

 

 

The practical reflections of the group

 

From the areas of reflection in which the group worked, various k-concepts and actions emerged which best represent the strengths of a new way of relating to tourism, but also the critical issues of the old logic of tourism which no longer respond to the needs of the new trend.

The reflections were:

 

Greater enhancement of inland areas, villages and green areas penalized by a sup-port policy biased in favor of seaside tourism;

Creation of experiential paths to be introduced in the national and international circuit;

A co-constructed integrated tourist offer able to deseasonalize and that it takes into accounthe natural cyclicality of the individual experiences to be proposed;

A territorial organization which takes account of local specificities, which does not divide up the territory, but which knows how to integrate it;

A tourist practice focused less towards structures and more focused towards services characterized by effective tools of storyliving;

An experiential tourism observatory, created, organized and supervised in the aca-demic field by tourism scholars, which supports operators and bodies in territorial planning with updated studies and analyses;

Continuous monitoring of the operators with the possibility to interact with the aca-demic world;

A major streamlining of the access processes to the opportunities set up by the regional and European calls;

Reactivate regulatory procedures that facilitate the establishment of regional tourist districts;

Enhance the lines of mobility both within the region and towards the region in order to facilitate vacation planning and travel;

Reinforce the digital aspect of experiential tourism;

A greater effort by the tourism categories to standardize structures and services towards sustainability, innovation and competitiveness;

Preparation of specific permanent training courses on Experiential Tourism Operators;

Need for a Framework Law on Tourism in Calabria which frames, regulates and sup-portshospitality, guides, productive integration.

•  

This idea of the Calabrian tourist offer becomes even more specific if we take into account the direction promoted by the collaborative group: the promotion of experiential itineraries.

There are 5 steps identified for the promotion of experiential itineraries (new or redevel-opment of existing ones):

 

Explicit the territorial vocation through the census of resources and experiential prac-tices to evaluate the potential;

Select and organize experiences in themes to converge in the Calabrian tourist offer system;

Listening to the market, i.e. understanding the tourist demand and identify the target;

Create attraction, ie activate image construction processes to stimulate curiosity;

Design itineraries as a tangible trace of the experience.

 

 

 

5. Conclusion

The results of qualtative survey can already outline the final reflections concerning the research activities.

The three years research have outlined the need to characterize the Calabrian tourist offer towards tourist experiences intended as a new organization of the tourist services, as indicated in the explanation of the meta-concept. At the heart of the new concept of expe-riences is the genius loci read in terms of daimons, but also the new spaces within which tourist performances are conceived and implemented, new tourists, new forms of participa-tion and collaboration, a new tourist policy making.

The experiences presented and proposed must be specified and contextualized and organized on the basis of their territorial and cultural identities, for this reason the new tourist offer must plan them taking into account the themes.

In the formulation of the desirable Calabrian tourist offer, the contribution of the col-laborative group established during the research investigation phases was decisive. A col-laborative group that has put in place a cooperative strategy aimed at change paraphrasing the Addante’s idea: “Calabria has a powerful identity. But it needs to be united” (corri-eredellacalabria, 2023). Through (individual and community) stories, the group not only interpreted events, the development of practical understanding of tourism and tourism policy, but also did something else: it highlighted the spaces in which planning is con-ceived and implemented. The stories told are stories of practice and in the stories there is learning because they produce knowledge. The planning process thus understood becomes a social process and an evolutionary and critical process enormously influenced by group values. The new spaces within which planning operates are those that are formed in that area between the public and the private, between the levels of government.

 

Funding The paper presents the results of a project work conducted in a three year reserach Grant in the ambit of PAC Calabria 2014–2020. Regional Thematic: S3 Tourism and Culture—Priority Axis 12, Action

B) 10.5.12.

6. Declarations

Conflict of interest The author declares of not having conflict of interest.

 

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