The Project
The data updated to 2018 from the research by the Centro Studi Turistici di Firenze on Destination Wedding Italia, i.e. the wedding market of foreign couples in the Italian country, commissioned by Italian Convention Bureau, the analysis perfectly highlights the state of affairs: 500.1 million is the annual turnover, for almost 9 thousand events. This is, therefore, a new frontier of Italian tourism, with an average of almost 50 guests per wedding, and an approximate cost of 56,890 euros per event. Obviously, these data refer to a situation prior to the COVID-19 pandemic events. However, it is assumed that, with the recovery of total or partial freedom of mobility, Destination Weddings will once again become a driving force for the entire touristic sector. In this context, Campania is the third most popular destination, after Lombardy and Tuscany, for wedding events in Italy. Given that the preferred regional locations for this particular type of tourism are undoubtedly the marine areas of the Amalfi and Sorrento coasts, this project aims to propose, as innovative touristic products for the wedding sector in Campania, additional and alternative destinations to those already known and widely affected by wedding events. In fact, this project aims to present to the identified target audience, as possible locations for wedding ceremonies, all those areas of the Campania region, especially inland, where there is a varied mosaic of castles, historical palaces, period residences and luxury country houses, often already structured to host events and celebrations. Often preferred by regional (or Italian in general) users, these locations have nothing to envy, in terms of services and naturalistic-landscape context in which they are set, to the more noble locations of the Campania coastal areas. If they are adequately promoted, they could easily arouse the interest of the foreign market which, as emerges from the studies mentioned above, is increasingly looking for new destinations, considered “exotic” and exclusive, for its wedding events. The “Campania Luxury Wedding” project therefore intends to bridge the gap between the offer of touristic destinations dedicated to weddings in Campania, alternative and/or complementary to the traditionally promoted ones, and its knowledge by the reference targets. Furthermore, this project also intends to present Campania, with particular reference to alternative tourist itineraries to those already strongly consolidated, as a destination not only for ceremonies, but also for honeymoons. This objective is to be achieved through the creation of virtual workshops hosted on a web platform specifically dedicated to the promotion of luxury wedding locations in Campania, where it will be possible to find videos, digital catalogues and other multimedia contents dedicated to the knowledge of this particular touristic product, as well as of the reference territories.