Trust shapes the journey: know who you’re relying on
Touring Experience was born from the meeting of CARSA - The Thinking Company, which has spent over forty years working with places and the people who live in them to build tourism that stays where it happens, and the Touring Club Italiano, which for more than a century has studied, documented and protected Italy’s cultural, landscape and environmental heritage.
CARSA leads the project, relying on its firsthand knowledge of the region and local communities. The Italian Touring Club acts as a guarantor, providing the model with its name and heritage as a sign of its reliability. The result is Touring Experience: the first certification of Italian tourism experiences.
We imagine a kind of tourism where choosing an experience is no longer a gamble
Today, when deciding what to do on a trip, we rely mainly on images, descriptions, and reviews. Five stars and an enthusiastic account tell us how someone else felt, but they can’t guarantee that the experience will be the same for those who come after. They don’t necessarily explain how the experience is structured, what determines its quality, or how well it lives up to its promises.
Touring Experience was born from a different vision: to make the quality of an experience recognizable even before taking part in it. We want to offer travelers looking for a meaningful way to discover a place where they can find experiences that have been selected and certified according to shared values and standards. These criteria allow travelers to make more informed choices, knowing what lies behind what is being offered.
Because quality isn’t just about the traveler, but also about the places that welcome them and the people who live there. A valuable experience must work for the traveler and, at the same time, help enhance the local area that offers it: its people, its stories, and its resources.
We recognize Italian tourism experiences that deserve trust
We do this through a certification process that verifies on site how an experience is designed, organized, and delivered, according to shared criteria of quality, sustainability, and value for the local area. The system is built around 7 areas and more than 90 indicators, which allow us to assess what a review often cannot convey: the conditions that underpin an experience’s quality and the relationship it builds with the local area and its community.
We offer travelers something tangible: a more aware choice before setting out, based on verified facts rather than on the promise of a description or the account of those who came before.
To those who host, we offer recognition for work well done: a way to make the quality of their experience visible, to show their commitment, and to demonstrate the value it generates for visitors and for the local area where it takes place.
Our values
Objectivity
We believe that quality should not be a matter of opinion. That is why we choose to evaluate it using common criteria, concrete indicators and defined thresholds. An experience can be described in many ways, but its quality must be verifiable.
Independence
We believe an experience should be assessed from the traveler’s point of view. That is why our auditors take part like any other visitor, without the provider knowing when the audit will take place: what is observed is the real experience, not one staged for certification.
Transparency
We believe there must be consistency between what an experience promises and what the traveller actually encounters. That is why we look at how the experience is actually structured and experienced: we do not consider how well an experience is described, but rather how closely what it promises matches what it delivers.