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IDM Südtirol-Alto Adige

A new model for economically sustainable tourism

Building a digital experience to strengthen sustainable tourism and ensure locals benefit from South Tyrol’s global popularity

Facts

Industry

  • Travel and Hospitality

About us

  • Sustainability

Get to know IDM Südtirol-Alto Adige

IDM Südtirol-Alto Adige is a driving force for sustainable economic development in Italy’s autonomous province of South Tyrol region.

South Tyrol is famous for its nature and its produce. The province, northernmost in Italy, is home to just more than a half million people.

IDM’s services aim to boost the province’s economy by strengthening the competitiveness of local business through targeted tourism, agricultural marketing and business services.

The organization’s mission is to make South Tyrol one of the most attractive and livable areas in Europe. It does so by focusing on sustainability, internationalization, innovation, regionality and now digitization.

IDM’s ambitious vision for South Tyrolean tourism and commerce

It’s not hard to drive tourism in one of the most naturally stunning places on Earth. Indeed, the region welcomed around 8 million arrivals in 2023.

Today, the challenge for popular destinations like South Tyrol is promoting sustainable tourism. For IDM, this means facilitating smooth tourist flow while supporting the region’s economic growth sustainably.

This means:

  • Protecting local produce. The region’s agricultural sector produces wines, smoked ham (or speck) and apples that can earn a “Quality South Tyrol” label. IDM wants to protect and promote these products.

  • Promoting local businesses. Small, family-run businesses are the backbone of South Tyrol’s economy. Locals shop at small bakeries and butcher shops, less so in supermarkets. IDM wants to ensure the competitiveness of such businesses.

  • Recapturing commission revenues. Each year, about €30 million in tourism revenue goes abroad, largely through commission fees that international booking platforms charge local operators. IDM wants to bring more bookings in-house so those commissions don’t leave the region.

  • Spreading tourism more evenly across the year. South Tyrol has two peak seasons: Winter and summer. Although spring and fall are lovely, too few beds get booked during the low seasons. IDM wants its digital ecosystem to help identify overcrowded hotspots and encourage low-season travel to reduce that strain.

IDM’s relaunched suedtirol.info website and its social channels represent a major first step toward realizing this vision. Website visitors have a wealth of information about the region available to them. About one-quarter of the 10,000-plus listed accommodations can be booked directly through the site. Visitors and locals will be able to book experiences, too, by the end of 2024.

IDM is also integrating a digital guest pass that will let people unlock some of the most exciting experiences in South Tyrol. This will let visitors get around on public transport, enter museums and much more without having to buy additional passes.

In the future, IDM also envisions addressing ecommerce. This would allow IDM to create a visitor experience like this:

A couple books a late-September hiking holiday. On the first night of their trip, they enjoy a hearty meal of beetroot dumplings, a speck-and-cheese platter, shortcrust apple strudel and a bottle of late-harvest Gewürztraminer wine from the Eisacktal Valley. The couple loves the wine so much they order a case for home delivery, directly from the winemaker.

Now, scale those capabilities to all 8 million-plus arrivals in South Tyrol each year. This becomes the digital foundation for sustainable economic growth across the region.

Fragmented data and competing perspectives

Realizing IDM’s digital vision means overcoming certain challenges, including:

  • Incomplete and disparate databases. Accommodation data across the region exists across multiple databases, with different owners, and the quality of that data can vary. Bringing booking flows into a central location means cleaning up and reconciling these kinds of data management challenges. The same problem exists for customer data: Incomplete and fragmented databases make it difficult to tailor communication and offers to individual consumers.

  • 100-plus stakeholders. IDM is a public-owned company with dozens of stakeholders, who often have competing interests. This means individual tourism organizations can find themselves competing for regionally relevant keywords in their digital marketing campaigns.

  • User experiences. This is another consequence of that region-level competition. Guests and customers have had to learn new page structures and user interfaces every time they visit another website in South Tyrol.

  • Mindset. IDM has its roots in destination marketing and project coordination. Becoming a digital organization with such ambitious goals means transforming their way of working.

  • Digital capabilities. The current guest pass system works with a paper ticket, and it’s supported by a 15-year-old system that’s hard to maintain. Further, IDM had to learn about modern platforms and data handling in a complex environment on the fly. Their team did not bring that kind of technical, in-depth knowledge to this transformation, nor did they have sufficient experience with agile product development approaches. At the same time, key aspects of digital marketing — SEO, analytics — had been contracted out.

Orchestrating South Tyrol´s digital evolution

Our role in this project has focused on strategic advice and orchestration. We identify what data and insights we can use to help IDM achieve the vision for South Tyrol. This is the core competence that allows us to reimagine digital travel.

Defining the strategy

In April 2020, we began by helping IDM answer basic strategic questions: What will the future business model look like, who will be the users and their journeys, what will be the needs of involved stakeholders? We also analyzed existing websites, apps and available external technical infrastructure like the Open Data Hub and booking engine.

In September 2020, we delivered a digital strategy along with a technical blueprint and a high-level backlog for the new digital ecosystem. That ecosystem included a CMS, a CRM, a customer data platform, an app and a digital guest card system, all built with a composable approach.

Consulting on content best practices

Next, we deployed user-centric methodologies like card sorting and tree testing to reimagine the site’s information architecture. In collaboration with IDM’s content team, we outlined a content experience strategy that included personas, customer journeys, a content audit and a content governance model.

Leading UX/UI enhancements

We were then selected to lead strategy and UX/UI in our work with Minsait, IDM’s primary development partner. We helped implement the new digital ecosystem, starting with a relaunch of the website in three languages. This work included enhanced requirements engineering, a new responsive and WCAG-compliant design system, and usability testing.

Fostering a product culture

A common thread throughout our engagement with IDM has been transforming the organization’s way of working. We always look for opportunities to help our clients level up their operational capabilities. We helped IDM do this by:

  • Establishing a regular cadence for program updates for internal stakeholders.

  • Consulting on backlog prioritization.

  • Establishing a product roadmap and KPI framework.

  • Introducing a run-and-scale approach post-MVP.

  • Consulting on conversion rate optimization.

  • Delivering Agile coaching.

  • Assisting in the restructuring of the digital team.

The versatile involvement of Valtech has created the basis for driving the digital transformation even more strongly through concrete projects — above all also through the networking of our regional companies — and making the South Tyrolean economy fit for the future.

- Erwin Hinteregger, CEO, IDM Südtirol-Alto Adige

Results

This is an ongoing engagement, so we prefer to think of our current results as a snapshot of work that’s very much in progress.

The major wins so far:

  • We helped IDM relaunch the MVP of the website. We have already seen marked improvement across KPIs such as conversion rates for bookings, newsletter subscriptions and time spent on site.

  • We have nudged the team toward a product culture in which individuals own their domains of expertise — moving away from a culture of project-by-project coordination.

  • We reimagined navigation structures to be more user-centric, reduced the total number of pages on the website, empowered the content teams to create higher-quality editorial pages and boosted SEO efforts.

Our next steps include:

  • Strategic consulting and conversion rate optimization for the suedtirol.info site.

  • Implementation of new features alongside an external development partner.

  • Consulting on how to collaborate with regional tourism organizations toward a joint omnichannel strategy.

  • Strategic consulting and UX/UI for the new Südtirol Guide App.Continuous improvement of the way of working via Agile coaching and better internal collaboration across departments.

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