Fiorenza Lipparini is the new head of Milan’s Destination Marketing Organization. It was founded by the Municipality of Milano and the Chamber of commerce of Milano and Monza Brianza Lodi, which through the YesMilano brand promotes the city to attract international tourism, human capital and foreign direct investment.
Milano and Partners: what to do
Week full of appointments in the tourism sector. Following the announcement of Winston Duke as ambassador for responsible tourism by UNTWO, today Fiorenza Lipparini was appointed as general manager of Milano and Partners, the city’s DMO.
Fiorenza replaces Luca Martinazzoli who saw the birth of the DMO of the city of Milan. His excellent work has been widely recognized by tourism operators, and who’s writing is one of them. In recent years the city has certainly exceeded expectations in terms of tourist arrivals and the test of the pandemic has been passed with flying colors.
However, a DMO does not only deal with tourism and in particular must not focus entirely on leisure tourism.
Enrollments of foreign students in our universities as well as the attraction of large foreign investments are and must be on the agenda of the new director of Milano & Partners.
Two great challenges on which not only the DMO but all institutions must decide whether to focus, or rather invest, or not.
Close collaboration between private and public is the only way to excel in destination marketing, especially in an area like Italy where the dialogue between those who have more freedom in generating value and those who have the duty to recognize that value is increasingly less frequent.
MICE: an unexplored territory
The third major challenge that the new director will have to face with particular speed is the MICE segment. The acronym MICE stands for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions. Basically this acronym describes all the business deriving from the so-called business tourism. A particular sector that generates around 20 billion in turnover every year and is made up of around 13,000 companies distributed throughout the national territory.
To give a very practical example of how this sector is also important for institutions, it is worth remembering the ERS Congress held in Milan just a couple of weeks ago.
The European Congress of Pneumology brought to Milan around 20,000 people who slept in our hotels, ate in our restaurants, used our taxis (when available) and visited our museums.
The revenue generated by an event of this magnitude is approximately 40 million euros. Of these, approximately € 400,000 ended up straight into the municipality’s pockets in the form of tourist tax. Nice!
Although the efforts made so far by Milano & Partners to improve the city’s performance in the MICE sector are evident, the results hoped for when the DMO was born appear to still be far away. The city of Milan does not yet appear in the top ten of ICCA, the association that checks how cities are actually attractive for large events, but above all there is a lack of commitment on the part of the operators, who do not seem to recognize the value that the DMO could generate for themselves.
The first thing to do is therefore to start an open dialogue with the city’s operators, to build a community around the DMO starting from its own people who must be hyper qualified. Otherwise trust disappears.
About Fiorenza Lipparini
Appointed by the Board of Directors, Dr Lipparini took office on Monday 2 October 2023, thus inaugurating a new chapter in the young history of the organization, building on the work carried out by her predecessor Luca Martinazzoli to take Milano to new heights as a magnet for international talent and foreign direct investment.
A commitment aimed at consolidating the mission of Milano&Partners: to catalyze the city’s energies to position it as a sustainable destination for leisure and MICE tourism, for transnational investment, and welcome and nurture the best international talents and startups.
“A cosmopolitan professional in the converging fields of innovation policy, urban renewal, digital transformation, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion”
Milano and Partners
*Cover picture as per Milano & Partners
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