Lignano Sabbiadoro is a seaside resort, which was actually founded at the beginning of the century as a holiday destination, but which bloomed in the Sixties and Seventies.
The historical centre of the modern town has developed around the “Fontana Square” and the club “Terrazza a Mare”, a famous meeting point on the beach that eventually turned out to be one of Lignano’s symbols.
The first beach resorts and the first hotels built in Lignano were located right in this area and some of them are still active in Lignano Sabbiadoro.
Many hotels have been recently refurbished in order to provide its guests with a lot of services, including satellite television, bicycle rentals, air conditioning and heating system, a peculiarity that should not be taken for granted.
Lignano is actually usually thought to be just a seaside resort for summer holidays, therefore only a few accommodations are equipped with heating system. It is easy to understand how harmful this could be for the overall tourist offer, which is in this way strongly limited. In fact, all new guidelines for the development of the Italian Tourism Industry suggest quite the reverse since experts maintain that the tourist offer in Italy must be no longer bound to the summer season and just a few hotels in Lignano seem to be already complying with these new suggestions.
In order to handle the crisis of the tourist sector several local associations supporting tourist development and advertising campaigns for the whole town have been founded by local businessmen: a common effort to create a complete “holiday system” seems to be the right way to remain competitive on a market sector, where the traditional boundaries of time and space have disappeared, thus originating a completely new system with its new rules.
The idea of “hotel” must be enriched with further interesting nuances in order to be competitive on the world market: these nuances can be understood as structural changes that involve heavy investments, or just as details concerning peculiar and exclusive services, like a web-cam for example: these last kind of changes do not require heavy commitment, but their effect is a kind of added value that perfectly balances the initial effort and they have a quite early and clearly positive return on investment.
Being consistent with their active participation in the above mentioned associations, some hotels have decided to introduce new innovative services that are thought from a more general point of view involving a cooperation among all local activities. For example, the Hotel Nettuno has decided to install a new web-cam which, due to its avourable position, allows a wonderful view on the town centre and on the beach of Lignano: access to the web-cam is free and easy, by clicking on the icon “webcam” every surfer will be shown the coast of the Upper Adriatic Sea in real time at any time during the day and in the night as well.
By installing this new service the Hotel Nettuno has not only improved the quality of its services, but it has actually helped increasing the visibility of the whole resort, too. Even though the experience of the Hotel Nettuno proves that this is a good solution, just a few hotels in Lignano have decided to offer a such a service, since it is actually an investment whose return is not exclusively for the investor and its costs involve image-investment, the relevance of which is unluckily not yet clear to everybody…