A gift card to go on vacation, hoping that soon it will be possible again. It is an idea to bring back the desire to travel but also a tool to give breath not only to hotels and museums but also to local traders and exhibitors who have experienced a long nightmare since the beginning of 2020. All those who are usually labeled as “induced” and offer all kinds of services to tourists: from coffee to dinner, from a day at the beach to a tourist trip by boat or in the woods, but also local crafts.
The Tourist Card – which belongs to the Mastercard circuit – is launched by Epipoli, an Italian fintech company and a pioneer of gift cards in our country. But if usually gift cards can be spent on single services or restricted categories of goods, this new card will give a much wider range of possibilities: the idea is to give space to the entire tourism supply chain. The other novelty is that this card, on sale in large-scale distribution and bookstores (but the goal is to display it also in stores abroad) will be usable in limited territories: a municipality, a homogeneous territory, such as valleys or coasts, or entire regions.
Of course, talking about holidays and entertainment in the middle of the third wave may seem like an exercise in optimism, but the whole tourism sector (which in 2019 represented 4% of the country’s added value) is trying to reorganize itself for the “general tests of normality ”, Under the banner of which will be the summer of 2021, with vaccination campaigns that everyone hopes will be at an advanced stage by June and with the idea of health passports, already developed by China. For this Epipoli hopes to involve local administrations as well: “We are open to collaborating with local authorities who want to personalize them or even make part of the ceiling available, for example on a 1000 euro card, 200 could be loaded by a region or a city. This would be an incentive for tourists, an initiative able to guide their choice on where to spend their next holidays ”explains Gaetano Giannetto, founder and president of Epipoli. A kind of holiday bonus, except that a much wider audience of merchants would benefit from it.
And then there is the issue of data. “Gift cards offer those participating in the project the opportunity to analyze how they are spent. A series of strictly anonymous data that allow both to adjust the game for the future and to retain tourists with personalized discounts, to convince them to come back again the following year ”continues Giannetto.
The first tourist cards will be on sale, assures the president of Epipoli, as early as spring. For users it will be like paying with a normal card, for merchants it will be enough to have a Pos, the important thing will be to register in the dedicated area in the portal that the Municipality or the Region will indicate, and which will be made available by Epipoli itself.
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