The “scattered hotel” consists of an hospitality solution, sited in a hamlet or in the historical center of a town, with rooms and services located in adjacent but distinct buildings.
It can be regarded as a single hospitality venue, managed as a normal enterprise, addressed to tourists who want to stay in a valuable and authentic urban context, close to the residents, relying on standard hotel services.
The Albergo Diffuso Ornica has been established in 2009 by the Cooperativa Donne di Montagna (“mountain women’s cooperative enterprise”), in the Orobic Alps, 33 km NNW of Bergamo, at an altitude of 920 m a.s.l.
This successful experience might be replied wherever similar geographic, demographic and urban conditions are met, taking benefit of the increasing demand for new forms of tourism (sustainable, responsible, experiential, slow…) and the enormous chances for free promotion offered by booking web portals.
From these experiences the useful hints for public authorities who would like to develop these initiatives could be:
1. taking into consideration these initiatives among those to be incentivised, providing for broader solutions than the usual ones into the calls for tenders (more often focused on hotel or B&B);
2. tourism promotion, activating “niche” channels that can intercept that part of the public interested in these solutions;
3.concerning territorial planning, acknowledging or enhancing these experiences for the purpose of protecting the building/landscape/cultural heritage; these kinds of initiatives are a tool for cultural/landscape/building stock protection.
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