Lake Garda Tourism Surges in 2000 Despite Domestic Decline

The year of the Jubilee closed positively for tourism on Lake Garda, despite the lake being largely ignored by the domestic clientele in particular, but also by Swedish visitors. “It will be our commitment to investigate the reasons behind this significant decline in the two tourist flows,” stated Marco Zaninelli, extraordinary commissioner of the Riviera degli Olivi tourism promotion company, when presenting the 2000 statistical data.

“We will do so as soon as possible,” he emphasized, “because understanding what did not work in the promotion aimed at the domestic market is important.” However, the long-standing positive figure remains that the number of tourist days along the Garda shore or in the immediate hinterland increased by half a million, rising from 8,189,344 in 1999 to 8,708,558 in 2000, representing a 6.3 percent increase.

Declines in Arrivals and Average Stays

Contrasting these figures, there was a slight decrease in arrivals, which fell from 1,509,102 to 1,471,255, a decrease of 37,847 people or two and a half percentage points. In other words, fewer people arrived, but stays were longer: from an average of five and a half days to nearly six.

While Italians’ disinterest in the large lake resulted in a decrease in both arrivals (37,830, a 9 percent decline) and overnight stays (125,037, a 6.2 percent decline), very positive results were recorded from the British and Dutch tourist markets.

Increase in Foreign Visitors

British visitors increased last year by 28.1 percent in terms of arrivals (from 65,396 to 83,790) and by 19.2 percent in overnight stays (from 476,213 to 567,868). From the Netherlands, the increase was 16.6 percent in arrivals (from 71,667 to 83,557) and 12.3 percent in overnight stays (from 734,623 to 825,023).

The German area also showed a very good performance, with an increase of 13 points in the flow from Germany (from 3,391,033 to 3,827,996) and approximately 10 points from Austria (from 417,996 to 458,993), in terms of days spent on the Garda Veronese Riviera or the immediate hinterland.

Composition of the Stays and Future of the Sector

The largest share of the total stays (58.5 percent) goes to non-hotel accommodations, which include campsites, residences, guesthouses, and apartments; hotels accounted for 41.5 percent of the business, which appears to have not experienced any stagnant phases since 1995, with Garda remaining an important destination especially for the European tourist market.

However, the provincial tourism councilor Davide Bendinelli expressed some doubts about the future, raising concerns about accommodation facilities, particularly those that are not taking advantage of the current favorable situation to modernize and keep up with the times.

“It is especially essential,” he stressed, “to reinvest profits to modernize businesses. This also calls for public administrations to avoid neglecting the needs of operators, who are engaged in a necessary leap in quality for their structures to remain competitive.”

“At the same time, it is crucial,” Bendinelli added, “to develop projects in synergy between tourism promotion agencies and private operators to create unique and prominent events in the territory, working with multiple municipalities to give more substance, content richness, and publicity to individual events.”