MILAN – “Hospitality Skills. The Art of Welcoming” is the title of a one-day event being held on 28 October in the Martini Room of Stella Polare, the futuristic congress centre at Milan’s new fairgrounds in Rho/Pero.
The event, which sees Host going into partnership with Milan City Council, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, the supermarket chain Conad and Intesa San Paolo Formazione, will focus on ways of strengthening and promoting the key skills needed to provide the very best hospitality. The ambition, however, is to go beyond the typical “symposium” format, where academics all too often get bogged down in the theory, and to concentrate instead on the actual things that need to be done to get hospitality right, and on the key players who are making a success of it, in various sectors and through a range of different organisations and structures. The idea is to tell the story of the process in order to encourage action, and to open windows onto different approaches, rather in the style of the now well-known Ted Talks, online lectures that promote “ideas worth spreading.”
The aim, ultimately, is to promote a true art of hospitality in order to create incentives for people to visit Italy – something it is in everyone’s interests to encourage. To do this we need to focus not just on the intrinsic qualities of the things Italy has to offer, but to work on communication, reception structures and everything else that is needed to make visitors’ stays satisfying and exciting (whether for business or for pleasure), to ensure that people feel at their ease in the country, want to come back, and will become “ambassadors” of the values and advantages of their chosen destination. This requires the collaboration not only of operators and administrators, but of the general public as a whole.
EVENTS – Quality hospitality to promote Italy
