Sicily Guide

Matthew Platania is a friend from Washington DC. He is passionate about Italy and Sicily. Recently, he has launched The Modern Italian Network, a community web site about everything Italian. Modern Italian is free and open to all people passionate about Italy regardless of ethnic heritage. Its members are provided with a robust technology to share their passion for Italy with others, upload limitless photos, join related groups, enjoy discounts on products and services from member companies and communicate with other people in the Network. The community site also includes Italian events across the country, places and resources to learn the language, and information on Italian travel and news. Great job, Matt!!!

Check it out at www.modernitalian.org

I started SicilyGuide.com because I thought there was little out there that talked about Sicily in the right way. Perhaps, I should have started an Italy Guide. In spite of the big money spent on the www.italia.it web portal, Amadeus denounces that Italy lags behind other countries and registered little visibility on the Internet today. Unfortunately, it is going to be hard to pick up especially with such a tumultuous political administration we have in Italy today.

I can write here that too many chances have been missing, but I will not do this. As a matter of fact, a country like Italy, for which tourism is one of the most important economic activities, does not have a serious strategy for online destination marketing. This is a bad sign. It is the usual story that Italy and the Italians prefer looking at the past rather than taking advantage of the new - low cost - technology. Spain and France are increasing their advantage over Italy every day and Italy just stays still without even trying to react (proacting is a term that I do not even dare using!).

Sicilian minor islands are mentioned every day lately. The Sunday Times is talking about Pantelleria and its regenerating power thanks to a new cream by Giorgio Armani.  As you fly into Pantelleria at the height of summer, what hits you first is the temperature: at 40C, it is the sort of shimmering, dry, dense heat that creates visual distortions on the horizon, without the dusty bluster of a sirocco to relieve it. Then you see scrub, yellowing grass, relative flatness and, last, outcrops of black, black rock.

Pantelleria is the strange, silent, volcanic island, midway between Sicily and Africa, to which Giorgio Armani repairs every August. “It is the only place where I truly feel I can turn off from the stress of working life,” says the designer, who first visited the island 35 years ago. “My sister says my face changes here. I turn off the spotlight, and my eyes are always focused on the clear sky.”

Read more at the TimesOnline

[techtagas: pantelleria, sicilian minor islands, giorgio armani, sicily]

I just received my weekly copy of the Business Week magazine and was happy to read a great travel article about Salina, one of the seven Aeolian Islands in Sicily. The title of the article is “If it were easy to get to… it wouldn’t be so unspoiled“. The content features most of the highlights of the island with traveling tips and advice. It is what a destination marketer wishes for!
As a matter of fact, Salina is a beautiful island. I have some of my happiest memories there: I still recall a dramatic bike-ride with my sister and some friends on the way to Pollara!

Unfortunately, good news does not last long when it is about Sicily… One of our Sicily Guide readers mentioned a letter sent to Beppe Grillo’s blog - a well known Italian comedian who has been barred from television for his own political views -  which denounces the peril of building a new harbor in Lipari, the biggest of the seven islands. I do not know the details of this project and it is hard to have an objective idea from so far away. However, it looks that Lipari is in serious troubles from the letter!

Read more about the Aeolian Islands
Business Week
Beppe Grillo’s blog

Technorati Tags [ salina | business week salina | beppe grillo | aeolian islands | lipari | sicily | sicily travel ]

Sharon Barresi from RespiridiVita.Blogspot.com answers a few questions for Sicily Guide. Sharon, from Maine in the USA, has been living in Sicily for fifteen years. After ups and downs as for everyone else who experiences a new culture, she feels to belong to Sicily now. Thanks for agreeing with the interview, Sharon! It is always interesting to learn how other people adapt themselves to live in Sicily.

Why did you move to Sicily and why did you pick Oliveri in the Messina province?

My very first visit to Sicily was in the summer of 1985. It was also my first European trip. I came with my husband and our 4 year old son. It was a wonderful vacation. We were building a vacation house in the spot where my husband’s grandfather had lived. It was torn down after an earthquake had hit the Naples area. The government was offering funds to persons who would tear down old decrepit houses and rebuild. It was a wonderful summer and we enjoyed ourselves. (more…)

Travel journals are fun and they have become even more fun with web 2.0. Everybody, even without HTML knowledge, can post itineraries, photos, videos, podcasts and maps online and share them with the entire world or only with family and friends.
The web 2.0 travel journals are consumers’ generated content: they are passionate, realistic, fresh and, most of the times, give insights that you would not get from any tourist authority. We tend to believe a perfect nobody that might have some misspells in his/her writing and doubt information that, instead, appears biased.

Here is a list of what travel journals say about Sicily at a glance (and my ratings):

TripAdvisor.com
Great for its hotels’ reviews, I found it weak on the general description of Sicily. The introduction about Sicily is full of misspellings, for instance. Anybody can change the introduction through a wiki style interface after registering as a member. I use TripAdvisor whenever I am visiting a place I do not know.
Rating: 7

IgoUgo.com
I find IgoUgo more traveler-centered than TripAdvisor. So, travel journals sound more complete. Sicily is well covered on its pages. IgoUgo does not have the impressive hotels’ reviews of TripAdvisor.com, but its members are serious travelers.
Rating: 7

Yahoo Travel
The functionalities are good, but you need to have a yahoo account. The site is also too much focused on selling travel. You can save your trip and share or keep it private. I was thrilled with the map: you are able to highlight all the places of interest of a destination without any problem. There is a great amount of travel journals about Sicily posted, but not always easy to search.
Rating: 6

VirtualTourist.com
Members seem to be really committed. I like that it makes easy to leave comments for other users. Downside: no hotel reviews.
Rating: 5

VCarious.com
A site born from the Web 2.0 revolution, it has more potential than the other two sites technologically speaking. Unfortunately, it does not have much market share. So, content does not match the great technological potential. I like the way it is organized and the great functionality. It does not have much content about Sicily.
Rating: 4.5

RealTravel.com
Good site with lots of content and straightforward architecture, but Sicily is not really featured in a complete way.
Rating: 4

Gusto.com
I enjoy the look and feel of the site, but content is poor for foreign travel. Also, the name of the site means “taste” in Italian… It would make sense to me if it were a web site with food travel reviews.
Rating: 3

Technorati Tags [ sicily | sicily’s travel journals | tripadvisor | igougo | virtual tourist | vcarious | yahoo travel | gusto.com | real travel ]

There are zillions of web sites about Sicily on the web today. When you search under the word Sicily, Google displays 13,600,000 results. Oh my God! I am passionate about Sicily, but I do not think I am going to check all of these results one by one. I know that these web sites are not all worthwhile. Sicily is not well presented on the Internet - only a few web sites do the job right and search engines have rewarded them, so consumers.
Statistics show that people look only at the top 10 results displayed on the first page. Some of the most complete web sites about Sicily are displayed on the first page of Google; others are new to the game and are not. So, besides sticking with the best ranked sites, I also went beyond the first page of Google results to find other interesting web sites that matched my interests and my idea of how Sicily should be portrayed online.Wikipedia/Sicily
The free content multilingual encyclopedia, which is constantly enriched with new collaborative content, was launched by Jimmy Wales in 2001 and now is one of the most visited web sites in the world. The wiki (collaborative web site that allows surfers to change content without registering) tends to be extremely search engine friendly. This explains its #1 position in the search engine ranking.
Pros: contents of Wikipedia about Sicily are good and easy to find. Cons: the wiki tends to be graphically limited and gives only a general overview.

Best of Sicily
This web site is the richest English language web site about Sicily I know of. You can find any type of information about Sicily on it. It is in plain html, but it looks almost like a wiki web site. “Best of Sicily” is well linked to many other web sites about Sicily and cited both on the Internet and offline.
Pros: accuracy and amount of information. Cons: content is not well organized, making it hard to find your way around on the web site. Also, pages are hard to read due to the heavy content.

Sicilia in Dettaglio
This web site is in English and Italian. Dettaglio means “detail” in Italian. I find that Sicily is truly shown in precise detail on this web site.
Pros: English and Italian translations; it contains information on almost any single village of Sicily. Cons: it looks too commercial with paid text links on the top of the page; site architecture is not clear.

Sicily’s Tourism Department
This web site is hard to find and shows all the limits of an already outdated institutional web site.
Pros: English and Italian; complete database of travel related businesses in Sicily. Cons: the navigation is messy and the URL is impossible to remember.

Sicily Web
It is probably the most complete and organized site about Sicily from this list
Pros: English and Italian, great for tracking events in Sicily! Cons: It is a bit too commercial.

Love Sicily
I found this web site through my feed aggregator and I loved it. The site supports RSS. It contains a nice blog that markets culinary tours and stays in the southeastern part of Sicily.
Pros: appealing, clear site architecture, engaging content and tone. Cons: it does not seem to be updated on a regular basis.

thinkSicily
This is a commercial site launched by Rossella and Huw Beaugie. Based in London, it started as a villa rental business and grew into a sophisticated online travel agency. It still offers villa rentals in Sicily, but lots of other tours have been added.
Pros: vast selections of beautiful villas in Sicily, great pictures and straightforward navigation. Cons: I cannot think of one: I requested their brochure online and I cannot stop thinking about those beautiful Sicilian villas as my ideal summer vacation.

Sicily Scene Blog
Great blog of a retired English teacher from Cardiff who now lives in Sicily. I always like to see the point of view of non-Sicilians, especially when it is so spontaneous. The blog is not pretentious and it does the job right.
Pros: the tone is passionate; the blog is currently updated and the English is great! Cons: no real downside… I am a Sicilian living abroad and this blog makes me miss Sicily too much!

Final considerations
The good thing is that search engines find a great deal about Sicily in English, but I hate to say that there are only a few gems out there. Most of the travel web sites about Sicily are commercial and lack the passion needed to involve people. Some hotels’ web sites that I have not included in this list are graphically interesting, but they are missing the boat of online marketing and Web 2.0 as well. I think that there are tons of smart and inexpensive opportunities to market Sicily on the Internet in a serious way, but nobody has yet to pick on this.

If you think I missed some great web site about Sicily, please leave a comment. I will be happy to review and give my opinion on it.

Technorati Tags [ best of sicily | thinksicily | love sicily | sicily scene blog | sicilia in dettaglio | sicilian tourism department ]

Social networking and web 2.0 technology have changed the web in the past few years. Blogs allow comments, wikis encourage collaboration, everybody can freely talk about anything they like and be heard. Sicily is on the Internet more than ever. What people publish online (journals, pictures, videos, etc.) undoubtedly has an impact.It is recent news that the Italian government spent 42 million euros on a web site to promote Italy as a travel destination (www.Italia.it). 42 million?!? YES! It was all over the news. Enraged, some volunteers put together a wiki in no time and argued that this was just a waste of taxpayers’ money. They are right! Now that web 2.0 technology is in place, consumers expect something else from a web site. This project, called Progetto David, has gained wide consensus in the Internet community and has been joined from a great number of enthusiastic marketing experts and tech people.

Surfing the World Wide Web, you can find lots of good and bad things about destinations. Italy is an example of how fast the online community can come together and work against the establishment. The most important thing to notice is that the conversation is on (The Cluetrain Manifesto). Destination marketers can join it or do nothing. It is up to them, but I do not think that ignoring the conversation is an option anymore.

Here is a small list of Travel 2.0 web sites where they can start joining the conversation about Sicily:

TripAdvisor.com
If you are a hotelier, you cannot afford dismissing the comments from this site. Owned by Interactive Corp. (the same company that owns Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, etc.), this web site represents the first stop for almost anybody who is booking a hotel in North America. It also displays journals, photo galleries and forums.

IgoUgo
This web site is owned by Travelocity, a Sabre company. It has similar format as TripAdvisor, but is more focused around the travel journals.

Google Videos (YouTube)
Not always the best videos for a destination, but it is a start. If you are a destination marketer, I would suggest that you convert any professional video you have into a short streaming video and upload it on YouTube right away. Before posting it, do not forget to put a frame with your web site URL on it. If the video picks up, it could be seen by literally millions of people.

Google Photos
You can get any type of photo by searching under the word “Sicily” on Google. Though, sometimes, they are not the best.

Flickr Photos
I think Flickr has the best destination photos online at the moment. There are some passionate people out there and they really show it through the pictures they take.

YahooTravel
You can virtually find any travel information on this web site; buy a vacation package and/or a plane ticket; write a travel journal; upload the pictures from your trips and share them with the online community or just your friends; etc. Plus, you have the reliability of Yahoo.com.

There are plenty of new sites where people publish their journals, pictures of their trips, travel tips, etc…

Here is a short list:
Gusto.com
Real Travel
Home&Abroad
TriuUp

Did I miss anything? Most likely, yes. Please, write to me at SicilyGuide@gmail.com or leave a comment.

Keep in mind to ALWAYS tell the truth about your destination and/or product. If you do not, the online community can start a backslash against you. Do not be intimidated; you will gain rather than lose if you decide to join the conversation.

Technorati Tags [ sicily | social networking | web 2.0 | travel 2.0 | destination marketers | italia.it ]

Sicilian tourism has been growing at an extremely slow rate. This is the impression that came from the third “Giornata dell’Ospitalita’”, a conference that recently took place at the Hotel Astoria in Palermo. Politicians and tourism professionals gathered together to discuss actions that could be taken to avoid a possible disaster for the industry.

In spite of the fact that the Region has invested heavily to increase the number of deluxe accommodations on the island, the occupancy rate per room has not grown proportionally. After the successful summer months that saw Sicily reaching record high presences, travelers have not flocked as originally hoped.

I personally believe that these signs should worry operators and push them to work closely with politicians on a strategy that promotes Sicily in a more dynamic way. Tourism is not only an industry that can be easily affected by political events and socio-economic situations, but it is also one of the most proactive industries. The edge gained this past summer could abruptly vanish, consequently making vane all the efforts made by the Region to promote tourism in the last five years.

No action is not an option.

Sicily will be the official sponsor of the first Bit Tourism Award in Milan this coming February 21. Bit, Borsa Internazionale del Turismo, is the largest exhibition in Italy of the tourism industry, showcasing a comprehensive collection of suppliers from over 120 countries at the Fiera in Milan from February 22 through 25.
The award, promoted by Bit and Panorama Travel, will be given to destinations such as cities, regions and countries which have distinguished themselves among Italian travelers and tourist facilities in the world, voted by professionals.

The Sicilian Region will be present at the exhibition with an innovative booth and a new slogan: “Sicily, the colors live here”.