Interview: Giorgio Garcea, CCO and COO, Cisalpina Tours

Giorgio Garcea is chief commercial and operations officer at Cisalpina Tours

Business travel in Italy is “destined to grow exponentially” in 2024, according to Cisalpina Tours, one of the country’s largest travel management companies.

According to the TMC’s chief commercial and operations officer, Giorgio Garcea, this growth will be largely driven by new ways of working and the country’s strong export market.

“Italy is an exporting country of excellence in the world, so we travel a lot to sell our products,” Garcea says, adding that hybrid work will also drive volumes up in the year ahead, with employees travelling more often between office headquarters and remote workplaces. This ‘super commuting’ is an emerging form of business travel that Garcea believes corporates – and the wider business travel industry ­­– should take into consideration.

According to estimates by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), business travel spend in Italy for 2023 is set to reach US$34.3 billion dollars – which, for Garcea, signals the country’s post-pandemic resilience. Nevertheless, as in most European countries, cost pressure and inflationary challenges persist.

“After a year in which companies suffered a strong backlash from air, hotel and car rental rates, the key words for 2024 are cost, flexibility and environmental sustainability as a factor of observation in travel policies,” he says.  

Reflecting on the rate hikes of the past 12 months and 2024 forecasts that suggest “more moderate” price increases, Garcea says “from now on, the tariff increase will be structural” and, while inflationary pressure may be easing, companies also need to be aware of CO2 mitigation costs.

“We are preparing for this scenario with the usual tools – lots of business intelligence and dedicated consultancy from our expert account managers, who work alongside those responsible for corporate travel spending and traveller safety to study the most appropriate solutions together,” he says.

“[Last year] we invested in several new technologies to allow users, travellers and travel managers to seize the pricing opportunities of a market that increasingly pursues the path of dynamism and in which time-to-market is narrower,” he adds.

In 2023, the TMC also embarked on an ambitious growth plan that saw it open offices in New York, Cyprus, Turkey, Brazil and Hamburg, with additional offices set to open across Europe as well as in South Africa and the Far East throughout 2024.

“We intend to increase our [presence] at an international level and not only concentrate on Europe,” Garcea says.

“We are also building areas of specialisation, such as the Cyprus office, which is mainly oriented towards the marine industry, and in Italy we have opened a VAAM (International Volunteering, Adoptions Associations Non-Profit & Missionary) division, which deals with the mobility of Non-Governmental Organisations and the third sector” he explains.

The Italian TMC is also sharpening its focus on Latin America as a future growth market and believes the growing demand for business travel between Europe and Latin America is “worthy of attention”.

“There are more than 3,000 Italian companies operating in the region, which represents a destination full of opportunities for ‘Made in Italy’,” Garcea says. “Mexico and Brazil, in addition to already being the two main markets for Italy, are among the geographies with more favourable demand prospects for Italian exports [and therefore business travel].”

One area where the TMC appears less enthusiastic, however, is artificial intelligence.

“I think [AI] will be a trend of study rather than implementation [in 2024],” Garcea says. “I don’t consider assistance to travellers through automatic chat to be a great innovation – we have had digital contact applications for many years now and 24-hour customer care that responds very well. For AI we are waiting for new models and algorithms to be definitively intelligent before we integrate them.”