How might tourism flows in Italy be managed ten years from now? And what role will data, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and public institutions play in shaping the relationship between visitors and destinations?
Fondazione IFAB’s new report, “Over-Tourism 2036 – Four Alternative Scenarios for Managing Tourism Flows in Italy”, tries to answer these questions through Strategic Foresight, building four alternative futures in which the tourist’s level of digitalisation and institutions’ ability to use data to govern flows both change.
The aim is not to predict which scenario will come about. The purpose of the report is different — and, for businesses, institutions and stakeholders, perhaps even more useful: to explore uncertainty in order to understand which risks, opportunities and decisions can already start to be addressed today.
Tourism is in fact a system in which digital transformation, infrastructure, sustainability, demographics, trust and the ability to govern data are increasingly interdependent. Thinking of overtourism purely as a problem of visitor numbers therefore captures only part of the picture: the issue also concerns how flows are detected, interpreted and redistributed, who owns the information that describes them, which areas manage to benefit from new technologies, and which risk being left on the margins.
From the present to 2036: using foresight to make better decisions today
The report is the result of the Strategic Foresight session held at the conclusion of the 2025–2026 cycle of the Digital Society Thematic Working Group, the initiative through which Fondazione IFAB involves its members and affiliates in exploring strategic areas for innovation, creating opportunities for exchange between different skills, experiences and perspectives.
The question guiding the work was: “In 2036, how will tourism flows in Italy be managed?”. Building on this question, the session explored four dimensions in particular: data ownership and protection, edge computing, energy sustainability and public perception of innovation.
The process involved 10 participants and 2 facilitators and unfolded through three main stages:
- Horizon Scanning
In the first stage, participants analysed 38 phenomena from a range of thematic areas, ranking them according to their perceived relevance to the future of tourism flow management. Among those considered most significant were artificial intelligence as support for public decision-making, data as new public infrastructure, the growing risk of digital exclusion, new technological threats, the need for collaborative ecosystems, and trust as critical infrastructure.
One of the most interesting findings of the work already emerges from this ranking: the future of tourism does not depend solely on the availability of more advanced technologies, but on the ability to embed them in social, institutional and territorial systems capable of using and legitimising them. - Driver Generation
Building on the phenomena that emerged, the group identified the two uncertainties considered most decisive for building the scenarios. The first concerns the tourist’s level of digitalisation, ranging from visitors fully included in the technological ecosystem to people with little access to new technologies; the second concerns the type of governance, along an axis running from a model based on data-driven decision making to more traditional forms of management. Crossing these two dimensions means asking not only how much technology will be available in 2036, but above all who will be able to use it, with what rules and with what capacity to turn data into public decisions. - Scenario Planning
Combining the two drivers produced a four-quadrant matrix. Participants worked on building the different futures through a process of individual and collective work, identifying the dynamics, threats and opportunities for each.
The session was supported by a purpose-built digital platform and a hybrid facilitation model, in which a human facilitator and an AI agent performed complementary roles.
During the scenario-building process, each participant was able to develop their own thinking through a structured, individual conversation with an AI agent. The human facilitator, meanwhile, retained methodological oversight, an overall view of the process and responsibility for the collective discussion.
This is a use of artificial intelligence that goes beyond automation: the technology is used to increase participation and depth of reflection, allowing each member of the group to build their own position before the shared discussion.
This, too, is a central element of IFAB’s approach: putting advanced technologies at the service of concrete processes of innovation, knowledge and decision-making.
This gave rise to the four Over-Tourism 2036 scenarios: “The Invisible Network”, “Smart Flows, Aware Territory”, “Analogue Travellers” and “Autonomous Travellers”. These are “ideal types”, not forecasts: conditions deliberately defined in sharp terms to make the consequences of different trajectories more visible and help organisations and decision-makers test their strategies and assumptions.
→ The Invisible Network
Governance is strongly data-driven, while a significant proportion of tourists have little access to digital technologies, and the efficiency of the system opens up a fundamental tension: how far can governance become pervasive before optimisation comes into conflict with citizens’ self-determination and trust?
→ Smart Flows, Aware Territory
A tourist fully at ease with digital technologies is matched with governance capable of systematically using data, where making a data-driven system sustainable requires expertise, transparency, social consensus and institutional capacity.
→ Analogue Travellers
Traditional governance is matched with a substantial group of tourists who continue to travel using analogue or semi-digital tools. In this case, the analogue tourist risks becoming “systematically invisible”, since their movements do not feed the decision-making models and their experience does not generate the data on which tourism policies are built.
→ Autonomous Travellers
The tourist is a hyperconnected, autonomous user capable of organising much of their own experience through digital platforms. Institutions, by contrast, structurally struggle to keep pace. The critical issue here is not only technological but also cultural, political and organisational: data is generated in growing volumes, but the real power to use it remains largely in the hands of major private platforms, which end up building a form of parallel governance over tourism flows.
Four scenarios, four tensions that already concern the present
One of the most important parts of the white paper emerges from the final comparison between the scenarios: despite their differences, four issues in fact run through all the futures explored, drawing attention back to challenges that already concern the present.
- How can we prevent technological innovation from widening territorial disparities?
- How will tourism change in an ageing society?
- Can data-driven governance exist without trust in institutions?
- Who will govern the data generated by tourism flows?
For businesses, public administrations, tourism operators, local areas and technology providers, these questions go far beyond tourism and concern how Italy will build its digital infrastructure, govern artificial intelligence, protect and make the most of data, develop new skills and try to distribute the benefits of innovation more evenly.
IFAB and its role as a bridge between research, technology and industry
The work behind “Over-Tourism 2036” also shows why tackling today’s major transformations increasingly requires an ecosystem-based approach.
Data, artificial intelligence, edge computing, infrastructure, energy, skills, regulation and public perception cannot be addressed as separate domains – quite the opposite: the capacity to innovate instead stems from the ability to bring research, technological infrastructure, businesses and institutions into dialogue around concrete problems.
It is in this space that Fondazione IFAB’s role within Italy’s innovation ecosystem takes shape. Based in Bologna, IFAB acts as a bridge between scientific knowledge, supercomputing technologies and industry, helping to enable innovation processes thanks in part to the advanced technological infrastructure at the Tecnopolo di Bologna and the expertise of the ecosystem built around High Performance Computing.
For companies, SMEs, start-ups, industrial organisations and stakeholders, this means being able to connect with a body of assets that combines infrastructure, know-how, professional expertise, opportunities for deeper learning and training pathways, turning emerging technologies from a topic of discussion into a lever for concrete projects.
The Thematic Roundtables fit exactly into this mission: to build spaces where different areas of expertise can meet, share challenges, explore possible developments and generate new directions for work. In this perspective, foresight is therefore not an exercise about the future for its own sake, but a tool for strengthening the capacity to act in the present.
Explore “Over-Tourism 2036” in Depth
What transformations could redefine the management of Italy’s tourism flows over the next ten years? What risks emerge from the encounter between digitalisation and governance? And what opportunities can be built starting now through data, expertise and innovative infrastructure?
Complete the form to explore the white paper “Over-Tourism 2036 – Four Alternative Scenarios for Managing Tourism Flows in Italy” in more detail, and learn about the Strategic Foresight methodology adopted by IFAB, the four scenarios developed by the Digital Society Thematic Working Group, and the main threats and opportunities that emerged from the discussion.
