Improving the Italian Airport Network to Support the Tourism Sector. Some Future Directions

Recent dynamics of both an economic and sector-specific nature have made national airport networks an essential element to attract new tourist flows. However, such networks have to made suitably accessible and must be linked to interchange hubs as what counts is not only the time/cost of the main travel link, but the whole trip from its origin to its most widespread destinations. Faced with such needs, many Western countries have long made provisions to offer high levels of service to ensure access to stable tourist flows and their related revenues. The latter are a key launch pad for the whole economy, in line with the established trend in more developed countries of ever-increasing economic weight of the service sector. Italy has several opportunities to reap the benefits of this sector: it is possible to combine different types of tourist flows, exploiting a wide range of resources, ranging from culture to nature, history and landscape. For such development to occur, Italy has to rationalise the distribution of the airport network nationwide, its use, the connections with other transport modes, endowments and accessibility of the same airports. This chapter aims to investigate the current situation of Italy’s airport network. The analysis was carried out by using secondary sources chiefly based on air traffic data for the year 2011 as well as the results of recent studies on the air transport sector in Italy. The findings highlight a number of issues which prevent the effective use of the airport network to support tourist flows as well as potentials for development. There are indeed many directions which may be taken to make Italian airport network more suitable for tourism requirements.