No One Sells Italy Alone: Why Collaboration Between Travel Professionals Is the Real Luxury (and the Real Business)

There is one thing that many years of trade shows, escorted groups and six-in-the-morning phone calls have taught us better than any master’s degree: in Italy, no one sells Italy alone. Not the tour operator in Boston who has the client but not the keys. Not the guide in Florence who has the keys but not the client. Not the DMC in Milan that has both, right up until the request for a helicopter to Positano on a Saturday in July lands on its desk. The product we sell is too big, too fragmented and too beautiful to sit in the hands of any one person.

This article is our manifesto and, at the same time, our open contract. We are writing it for two readers: the tour operator or travel advisor who buys services in Italy and wants to stop paying intermediation as if it were a tax, and the Italian professional (licensed tourist guide, tour leader (accompagnatore turistico), driver, private chef, art historian) who has understood that the phone rings more often when you make it ring for others too. The two readings intersect, because the model we propose only works if it pays off for both. If you are in a hurry: the rules of the game and the frequently asked questions are at the bottom. If you have time, let us start with the numbers, because without numbers this would remain a nice speech.

This piece is the hub of a series: in the coming weeks it will be followed by a portrait of the silent collapse of the mid-market, the five warning signs in a contract with an Italian DMC, and the Italy Desk retainer model for family offices. Anyone who wants to understand right away how we work with operators will find the formulas on the tour operator consulting page; anyone who wants to join the network starts from work with us.

The numbers no one lines up

For Istat, 2024 was the “highest year ever recorded historically” for Italian tourist movement: 139.6 million arrivals and 466.2 million overnight stays, with foreign arrivals up 8.9% and foreign overnight stays up 8.4%. Foreign visitors now account for 53% of arrivals and more than 54% of nights. According to the provisional data released in March 2026, 2025 added a further +2.3% in overnight stays (with foreign nights at +4.3% and the foreign share rising to 56.5%), while in July 2026 the Ministry of Tourism spoke of roughly 477 million total overnight stays, a new record.

The Bank of Italy, in its survey on international tourism published in June 2026, measures foreign travellers’ spending in Italy in 2025 as up 4.6% in nominal terms, with a tourism balance surplus of 22.7 billion euros, about 1% of GDP, and attributes almost two thirds of the growth to visitors who came for the Jubilee. The Ministry estimates tourism at 13% of national employment, with more than three million workers between direct and induced jobs. And, a detail that closely concerns anyone working at the top end of the market, the Thrends report picked up by Il Sole 24 Ore in November 2025 places Italy on course to become the second-largest luxury hospitality market in the world after the United States: 745 five-star hotels set to become around 900 by 2028, luxury revenues at 7.8 billion, segment RevPAR at 656 euros with +14% year on year, foreign demand at 76% of the total.

Then there is our specific market, that of experiences. Phocuswright, July 2026: the tours and activities sector was worth 253 billion dollars in 2024 and will be worth 342 billion by 2029; in 2024 it grew by 17% against 6% for travel as a whole. Arival, August 2026, already estimates it at 271 billion for 2025. But the figure that should give pause to anyone working in the field is another one, again from Phocuswright: only 33% of experiences are booked online, against 64% for tourism in general. Two thirds of the experiences sold in the world still pass through one person who knows another. That is where we work.

The Italian paradox: an enormous market, a supply chain in fragments

This gigantic market rests on a structure made of the very small. According to the Fiavet-EBNT research presented in December 2024, there are around 7,100 active travel agencies operating in Italy, of which just 290 are inbound-oriented. The National Register of Tourist Guides (ENGT) established by Law 190/2023 counts, as of August 2026, more than 17,000 licensed guides, to which the 804 who passed the first national examination have been added. Arival observes that more than 70% of experience operators worldwide are micro-enterprises. Add seasonality and concentration: according to the “99% of Italy” campaign reported by Skift in June 2025, 70% of international visitors concentrate on 1% of the territory; the Ministry speaks of 4% of the territory receiving 75% of visitors. And add staffing: in Unioncamere’s Excelsior surveys, between 47% and 54% of the profiles sought by tourism in summer are hard to find.

Put these things together and you get the exact photograph of our work: a vast, wealthy and growing demand that arrives concentrated in the same ten square kilometres and the same twelve weeks, and on the other side thousands of excellent, isolated professionals who in July say no to three jobs a day and in February wait for the phone to ring. The problem with Italian tourism is not demand. It is that the supply is not connected.

And yet Italy knows how to do this better than anyone. The Italian economy has never won with giants: it has won with districts, hundreds of small businesses from the same territory that pass work to one another, share suppliers and compete abroad as if they were one. Prosecco, Parmigiano, Emilian mechanical engineering, Neapolitan tailoring and Belluno eyewear are networks before they are companies. Experiential tourism is the only sector of Italian excellence that has not yet organised itself into a district, and it pays for that every time a foreign platform keeps a quarter of the value of a walk through Trastevere. The network we describe here invents nothing: it applies to our trade the model that made Italy an exporter of things done well.

The intermediation tax: what it costs to sell alone

Those who are not connected to other professionals connect to the platforms, and pay. The big experience OTAs do not publish a price list, and this should be said plainly: Viator states only that “commissions vary by location” and charges a listing fee of 29 dollars per experience; GetYourGuide, on its official page about its new calculation system, gives no percentages. But the data gathered by the industry speak clearly. Arival, July 2025, reports operators with a base Viator commission of 27% and the news that GetYourGuide has raised its commission to 30% for some operators (previously 20%). Industry sources place Viator between 20 and 30%, typically around 25%, on top of which comes the booking fee paid by the traveller. Airbnb Experiences officially declares 20%. Booking.com, for hotels, runs between 15 and 18%.

And the weight of these channels is growing. In the 2026 edition of the Global Operator Landscape, based on more than 5,000 operators surveyed, Arival finds that OTAs intermediated 37% of operators’ bookings in 2025, while bookings from direct websites recorded “the sharpest drop in the history of the study”. In plain terms: an operator that turns over 400,000 euros in experiences and puts 37% of it through the platforms hands over between 30,000 and 45,000 euros a year to an intermediary that has never seen its client’s face.

We are not saying the platforms are evil. They do a job, they promote, they bring volume, and that 25% is worth it for those who have no alternative. We are saying something simpler: if a professional brings a tour operator a client who is ready to buy, they are doing exactly Viator’s job. And they should be paid like Viator. This is the first pillar of our model, and we put it in figures because figures avoid misunderstandings.

The model: three forms of exchange, one principle

The principle is fair and equal: no one works for anyone else, everyone works for the client, and the value goes to whoever produces it. In practice the exchange takes three forms, and it is worth distinguishing them because they are not settled in the same way.

1. The exchange of services and clients. A tour operator or a professional performs a service and passes the client on to someone else for the next one: I pass you the family in Rome for three days, you pass me the same family in Florence the following week, or I do the tour leading and you the driving, and we swap our respective clients whenever geography or specialism requires it. It is an exchange in kind, it is settled on end-of-season numbers rather than on the single file, and over time it always tends towards balance, because whoever does not reciprocate simply drops out of the circle.

2. A fixed commission when a professional brings a client to a tour operator. Here there is only one rule: the commission must be proportionate and equivalent, or nearly so, to what the tour operator pays the platforms. It makes no sense, and it is not serious, to offer a guide who brings you an American family worth 12,000 euros 5% “because we are friends”. That guide has done the promotion, has won the trust, has brought money into your account through their own work, exactly as an OTA would, with the added bonus of a client who arrives already briefed, happy and with a complete brief. As a guide, we are talking about 15–25% of the value of the service sold, with 20% as the natural point of equilibrium: enough to recognise the work, less than the platform would cost. Whoever offers less is not saving money; they are choosing to stay alone.

3. Passing contacts between colleagues, with no percentage. In our group of tour leaders, guides and tour operators there is a rule that looks naive to outsiders and looks to us like the most rational of all: if a client asks you for a service in another city, or a service you do not handle personally, you do not ask for a percentage to pass the contact to whoever will take care of it. You do not do it because you know that, working as much as we do, tomorrow it will be you who has a need that this colleague, or another, will solve without asking you for anything. It is a time bank that pays interest in reputation. The day someone tries to monetise the single handover, the system jams; the day everyone keeps it free, the system becomes the most efficient search engine in Italy, because every node personally knows the nodes next to it.

Coopetition: the word that explains why it works

In 1996 two economists from Harvard and Yale, Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff, gave a name to what Italian merchants had been doing for centuries: co-opetition, cooperating to enlarge the pie and competing only in dividing it. It is the exact description of a pool of operators. In the market we are competitors, and that is fine: the client chooses whom they prefer. But the pie, that is the number of travellers who decide to buy a curated Italian experience instead of a skip-the-line ticket from a platform, we enlarge together or we do not enlarge at all. Every “no” that a fully booked professional says to a client without passing them to a colleague is not one client fewer for them: it is one client more for the platform or, worse, for the unlicensed operator who always answers. The client belongs to no one. They belong to the service they receive. And in a network, the service is always received.

There is also an effect that those who work alone do not see: the value of a network grows faster than the number of its members, because every new node adds connections to all the others. Ten isolated professionals are ten telephones. Ten connected professionals are forty-five pairs that can pass work to one another, and a single number a tour operator needs to save in their address book. This is why a network grows by selection and not by enrolment: a wrong node does not subtract one, it subtracts all the connections it should have held.

A worked example with numbers

Take a licensed guide in Rome, a good one, with a diary full from April to October. In one season she turns down, for lack of time, some forty requests: say ten days of tour leading that she passes to network colleagues (ten days at 500–600 euros, so 5,000–6,000 euros of work that stays in the circle instead of ending up on a platform), twenty requests for other cities that she passes on without asking anything, and ten requests for complete packages (car, hotel, several cities) that she brings to a tour operator in the pool. If those ten packages are worth 8,000 euros on average and the agreed commission is 20%, the guide has generated 80,000 euros for the operator and has earned 16,000 euros without working a single extra hour: more than many guides invoice in an entire winter. Meanwhile the colleagues to whom she passed the ten days have returned them in low season, and the twenty contacts passed on for free in other cities have come back as twenty introductions, that is, as twenty clients who arrive already convinced.

Now take the operator. It has received 80,000 euros in sales while paying 16,000 in commission, against the 20,000–24,000 a platform would have charged for the same clients, with the advantage that these clients have a name, a brief and a trusted person who introduced them, and who will see them come back. It has saved money, it has gained a channel that does not change its terms unilaterally from one year to the next, and it has a guide who, when it is overbooked, solves that Saturday in July. The figures are hypothetical; the mechanism is not.

The overbooking pool: the moment when the network is worth more than any contract

Every serious operator knows that Saturday in July. Three requests for the same tour leader, a driver off sick, a foreign agency adding eight people to the group the day before. Whoever is alone cancels, or accepts a service they do not know how to deliver. And then comes the review.

On reviews the data are merciless and worth reporting. In the Viator/Tripadvisor research on operators, 89% of travellers consider reviews an important factor when booking an experience, 79% read up to ten per experience, 78% prioritise the most recent ones; in Tripadvisor’s global study of more than 23,000 users in twelve markets, Italy included, 72% always or often read reviews before choosing. A cancellation or an improvised service does not cost you that one service: it costs you the queue of bookings that the review, sitting at the top of the page for weeks, will take away from you.

Putting overbooking into a collaboration pool between tour operators changes the terms of the problem. When you are full you pass the work to a colleague who shares your standards: you avoid the cancellation and the negative review, and in any case “you end up with something in your pocket” (the commission described above, or the exchange credit); they grow and work; the client notices nothing except that everything worked. When it is the colleague who is full, the flow reverses. It is the mechanism airlines have used to protect themselves through interline agreements for decades; we do it with a phone call, but the logic is identical: no one leaves a client stranded, no one works below their own standard, no one loses. The only condition, and it is non-negotiable, is that inside the pool there are shared values and methodologies in the method and in the service offered. A pool of operators who work in different ways is not a pool, it is a roulette wheel.

Between colleagues: a good name is the only asset that never depreciates

The same applies, on a smaller and more human scale, between tour leaders and guides. When we are full, we pass agencies and private jobs to one another. Whoever receives the work knows where it comes from and does it well, partly so as not to let down the person who made the introduction; whoever passes it on does not lose the client, they consolidate them, because the client remembers that “they solved it even when they could not do it themselves”. In lean times, and in this trade they come for everyone, the phone of those who have passed on work always rings, and no one holds back when it comes to a good introduction. No advertising campaign can buy this. It is accumulated in small doses, one handover at a time, over years.

It is worth saying this to those entering the profession now, perhaps with the national licence freshly obtained: Law 190/2023 has finally given guides a national register, a serious examination (written, oral and practical; the second call closed in May 2026) and, from August 2026, an anti-counterfeiting ID card that the Ministry presents as “a decisive step against unlicensed activity”. It is a framework that protects those who work well. But the framework does not bring clients. The network does.

Values and method: without them, the network is just an address book

A network is not a list of contacts. It is a set of people who know what to expect from one another without having to write it down every time. That is why, before collaborating with someone, we look at a few things, always the same ones:

• Compliance and good standing. A guide registered with the ENGT, a licensed tour leader, an NCC chauffeur in good standing, a VAT number, third-party liability insurance (this is the first filter of our service for finding a certified tour leader). In a sector where unlicensed activity is still a problem, and the penalties are real, working with someone who is not in good standing exposes everyone.
• A shared method. We call it the Cold Mind Method (free certification for those who join the network): preparation before, calm during, reporting after. The name does not matter, the substance does: written brief, emergency contact, timings confirmed the evening before, no improvisation on the things that can be foreseen.
• The client’s standard, not ours. A guest paying several hundred euros a night for a suite will not tolerate a “school trip” excursion. Whoever joins the pool agrees to work at the level of the most demanding client in the pool.
• Transparency about money. Who brings what and who collects what is written down beforehand, in two lines, and honoured afterwards. The rules of engagement we ask for and offer are public in the Charter of 15 and in our duty of care.
• Reciprocity over time. We do not keep score at every handover. We keep score at the end of the year, and whoever has only received knows it without being told.

The ethical choice: whom we do not work with

There is one point that is usually left out of a marketing article, and which for us is instead the centre of everything: the ethical choice of whom to collaborate with remains. A concrete example, because we have seen it. There are agencies and tour operators that, before the tour begins, deliberately send clients a message with a link “to collect tips for the team”. The client, in good faith, pays. The professional who actually delivered the service, the guide who walked four hours under the sun, knows nothing about it and never sees a cent. This is not an accounting detail: it is a declaration of how that operator understands its relationship with the people who work for it.

If you work with an agency like that, do not complain when the universe turns against you: you choose where to stand and whom to work with. We have chosen. We work with those who pay the agreed commissions, pass the tips on to those who earned them, tell the client the truth about costs and do not ask a colleague to work below cost “to get known”. And, with the same frankness, we do not work with the others. A tour operator reading these lines and recognising itself in the first description has already found a partner. One that recognises itself in the second has already had our answer.

What we bring to the table

Whoever proposes a fair exchange must bring something. Here is what we bring.

The network. TourLeaderPro brings together hundreds of tour leaders, licensed guides and operators throughout Italy, selected for compliance and method, with a free members’ area for those who are accepted, a collaborations page where members pass work to one another, and a tour operator area for those who buy. It is not a marketplace: it is a group of people who call each other by name.

The showcases of experience in the field. We do not publish catalogues of services; we publish what we actually do, city by city, so that a tour operator can judge the method before trusting it. EstateRomana, born in the 2020 lockdown with a thousand things to do and see within two hours of Rome, is today the daily map with which we accompany our guests in the capital: from experiences to Rome by night to day trips near Rome. ItalyPlanner is the same thing on a national scale, in English, for the audience that then becomes our partners’ client: from the Amalfi Coast guide to the two-day Florence itinerary, through to the comparisons no catalogue makes, such as Amalfi versus Cinque Terre. Anyone who wants to understand how we work does not need to ask us for a brochure: they need to read.

The Italy Desk. For the tour operator or family office that wants a permanent point of contact in Italy, tour operator consulting and advisory formalise in a retainer what this article describes as a culture: a number to call, always. For those who first want to train their own staff on the Italian rules there is staff training for tour operators; for those looking for partners there is the database of Italian tour operators.

Trade show representation: one team, many operators, one expense

There is another place where “selling Italy alone” is expensive, and that is the international trade shows: ILTM in Cannes in December, ITB in Berlin in March, WTM in London in November, IMEX for the MICE segment, Virtuoso Travel Week, PURE, and the regional shows of emerging markets. A medium-sized tour operator or DMC that decides to go on its own pays for the exhibition space or the table in the appointments area, the graphics, the giveaways, and then flights, transfers, accommodation, meals and per diem for one or two people for four or five days, not counting the days those people are not in the office processing files. The bill, before a single hand has been shaken, easily reaches several thousand euros for a single show; for a calendar of three or four shows a year the figure becomes a budget line that many small operators simply strike out, giving up the very markets that would most be looking for them.

The solution we propose is the same logic as the pool, applied to promotion: a multilingual TourLeaderPro team, with different skills and aptitudes, represents a group of tour operators at the show. The group can be of two kinds, and both work. The first brings together operators united by the same manifesto: the same idea of service, the same standards, presenting themselves to international buyers as a single, coherent Italian offer. The second brings together complementary operators: different services, different regions of Italy or Europe, which together cover what a foreign counterpart almost always asks in the same conversation, namely “and for Sicily? and the North? and transfers? and villas?”. In both cases the buyer talks to one person who can answer for everyone.

The advantages, in order of concreteness:

1. The saving. Representation, promotion and any giveaway costs, and the flight, transfer, meals, accommodation and per diem costs of TLP staff, are divided among the operators represented. Those who would have gone alone pay a fraction; those who would not have gone at all are now there.
2. Practical, immediate solutions. A buyer in Cannes looking for a solid, structured Italian partner does not want to hear “I’ll get back to you”: they want a name, a method, a net rate and a contact who answers. A team representing a group of operators with shared rules can give that answer at the table, in the buyer’s language, and pass the contact to the right operator that same evening.
3. A better, more international image. A table with a multilingual team presenting a coordinated Italian offer communicates structure, continuity and seriousness; an owner on their own, however good, communicates a small business. For markets that buy reliability before price, the difference shows in the number of confirmed appointments.
4. The rule of delegating. And this is perhaps the most important, because it is a rule of management before it is a rule of marketing.

On delegating, the history of Italian enterprise has a six-hundred-year-old lesson. The Medici Bank did not conquer Europe because Cosimo travelled: it conquered it through the branches in Bruges, London, Geneva, Lyon, Avignon and Rome entrusted to factors and minority partners, carefully chosen men who represented the parent house, negotiated in its name and shared its profits and responsibilities. Venetian merchants did the same with their agents in the trading posts of the East; the Hanseatic League with its Kontore. None of them thought that “being represented” was a loss of control: it was the only way to be in several places at the same time. Adam Smith, in 1776, turned it into a system with the example of the pin factory: wealth comes from the division of labour, not from doing everything yourself. And Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1913 autobiography, formulated it as a rule of command: the best executive is the one who has enough sense to pick the right people to do what he wants done, and enough self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it. (The sentence, often quoted in shortened form, is his; other famous maxims on delegation attributed to Carnegie or Jobs circulate in versions that are not always verifiable, and we prefer not to put them in anyone’s mouth.)

For a tour operator, the principle translates like this: it is better to be represented well than to represent yourself alone and badly, and it is better to be at three shows with a team than at one with the owner exhausted after the flight. The owner is needed in the office, closing the contracts the show has opened. Representation too, like everything in this article, has written rules: a clear mandate on what the team can and cannot promise, a net price list shared before departure, a report for every appointment within 48 hours of the show closing, and contacts that remain the property of the operator represented. The cost is “from” and is built on the number of operators in the group and on the trade show calendar; the details are on the page dedicated to trade show representation (and in what we had already written about tour operators at international trade shows), and anyone who wants to build a group for the next trade show season would do well to write to us a few months in advance, because the best spots in the appointment areas run out early.

The rules of the game, on one page

For a tour operator or travel advisor who wants to join the pool:

1. Standards before prices. You send us your standard brief, we send you ours. If they match, we talk rates.
2. Net rates, written commissions. The service has a net rate; if one of our professionals brings you a client, the commission is the one agreed (as a guide, 15–25%), written down beforehand, paid at 30 days.
3. Shared overbooking. When you are full, the work passes into the pool and stays at your standard. When we are full, the reverse.
4. Tips to those who earned them. Always, without exception.
5. A person, not a ticket. Every collaboration has a point of contact with a name and a mobile number.
6. At trade shows, as a group. If you want to be in Cannes, Berlin or London without paying on your own, you join a group represented by the TLP team, with mandate and price list written before departure.

For an Italian professional who wants to join the network:

1. In good standing, with verifiable documents.
2. A method, yours or ours, as long as it is written down.
3. You pass on work when you are full, and you do not ask for percentages on contacts.
4. You work at the level of the most demanding client, not the easiest.
5. You introduce yourself from the work with us page or directly through the network application: we read everything, we answer everyone. In the field, the operational checklists and the multilingual emergency phrasebook in the members’ area are waiting for you.

The objections we always hear (and the answers)

“If I pass the client on, they will steal them from me.” A client who is served well by a colleague you introduced comes back to you, because you are the one who “solved it”. A client you say no to comes back to no one. Client poaching exists, and it is the reason the network selects: whoever does it once is out, and in a sector as small as ours everyone knows within a week.

“I lose margin.” You lose 20% on a client you would not have had (and on what a tour leader really earns we have already done the sums). The platforms charge you more on clients you do not even know afterwards. And the real margin in this trade is not on the single file: it is on repetition, on the client who comes back, on the advisor who sends you the next family.

“I have no time to coordinate.” Coordination is one phone call and two written lines. You lose time when you are alone: looking for a driver at eleven at night, replying to a negative review, redoing a quote a colleague had already prepared.

“Tax-wise it is complicated.” Less than it seems, but it has to be done properly: the commission is invoiced as an intermediation commission, the service as a service, the exchange of clients is settled with cross-invoices, and every agreement is written down beforehand. Those who are not in good standing do not enter the pool for precisely this reason; on supplier management by tour operators we have written a separate guide. (For your own specific position, your accountant’s advice always applies: here we describe a method, not tax advice.)

“With whom?” With those who share standards, method and values, and prove it. It is the only objection to which we have no ready answer, because the answer is selection, and selection takes time. But it is also the only objection which, once resolved, makes all the others irrelevant.

Why now

Three things are changing at the same time and make 2027 the right year to join a network. The first is regulatory: with the National Register and the anti-counterfeiting ID card, for the first time a foreign tour operator can verify in a minute whether the guide being proposed is licensed, and this rewards those who work in good standing and those who can prove it for every member of their network. The second is market-driven: Italy is becoming the second-largest luxury market in the world, and the luxury client buys reliability, not price; the reliability of a network can be demonstrated, that of an individual can only be hoped for. The third is technological: more and more travellers and advisors ask an artificial intelligence assistant “who can organise three private days in Sicily for me”, and the assistants cite those with a verifiable structure, people with a first name and surname, written rules and public content describing them. A network with a manifesto is visible to these searches. A lone professional with a profile on a platform is not.

The network manifesto, in ten lines

1. No one sells Italy alone.
2. The client belongs to no one: they belong to the service they receive.
3. Whoever brings a client is paid like anyone else who brings one for a fee.
4. Whoever passes on a contact asks for nothing: tomorrow it will be their turn.
5. When you are full, the work stays in the circle, never stranded.
6. The standard is that of the most demanding client in the pool.
7. Tips go to whoever did the walking.
8. Every agreement is written down beforehand, in two lines, and honoured afterwards.
9. Better to be represented well than to represent yourself alone and badly.
10. Whom to collaborate with is an ethical choice, and we make it every day.

For the discerning guest

All of this, for the end client, translates into one thing only: nothing happens to them. They do not find out that the guide has changed, because the one who turns up has the same brief and the same method. They do not find out that the operator was overbooked, because the pool absorbed the peak. They do not find out that their travel advisor in New York called a person in Rome who called a person in Palermo, because in the morning there was a clean car with a driver who knew their name. The discerning guest does not buy a service: they buy the certainty that, if something goes wrong, someone who trusts someone else will solve it before they even notice. That certainty cannot be produced alone. It is produced in a network.

Frequently asked questions

How much should a tour operator pay a professional who brings them a client?

As a guide, 15–25% of the value of the service sold, with 20% as the reference point: a figure proportionate to what the same operator pays the OTAs (industry data speak of 20–30% for Viator and GetYourGuide, 20% declared by Airbnb Experiences), in exchange for a client who is already loyal and briefed.

And between colleagues, when a contact in another city is passed on?

In our network no percentage is asked for passing on a contact. The counterpart is reciprocity over time: tomorrow it will be you who needs a name in Venice or Lecce.

What is the overbooking pool?

An agreement between operators who share standards and method: when one is full, the work passes to another in the pool at the same level of service. It avoids cancellations and negative reviews, and it helps whoever receives the work to grow.

How do I join the TourLeaderPro network?

From the Work with us page or through the network application, with verifiable documents (ENGT, tour leader licence, NCC, VAT number, insurance) and a willingness to work with a written method. The members’ area is free for those who are accepted.

Can a foreign tour operator work directly with you without a DMC?

Yes. For those who want a permanent point of contact there is the Italy Desk retainer formula; for one-off collaborations a brief and a contact are enough. In both cases the rules on this page apply.

How does group trade show representation work?

A multilingual TourLeaderPro team represents at the show (ILTM, ITB, WTM, IMEX and others) a group of tour operators, either united by the same manifesto or complementary in services and territories. Stand, promotion, travel, accommodation and per diem costs are divided among the operators; every operator receives the contacts and a report for each appointment. The cost is “from”, depending on the number of operators and the shows chosen.

Why do you refuse to work with certain operators?

Because a network’s reputation is the sum of the reputations of those who belong to it. Whoever keeps the tips, fails to pay the agreed commissions or asks people to work below cost puts everyone else at risk.

Sources checked on 4 September 2026: Istat, Tourist flows – Year 2024; Istat, Tourist flows – Q4 2025; Bank of Italy, Survey on international tourism 2025; Ministry of Tourism, tourism generates 13% of employment; Milano Finanza, interview on tourism in 2026; Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy second super-destination for luxury tourism; Phocuswright, Tours and activities are outgrowing travel overall; Arival, Direct bookings dive, OTAs rise; Arival, GetYourGuide commission increasing for some operators; Airbnb, service fees for experiences; Skift, You’ve only seen 1% of Italy; Guida Viaggi, Fiavet research on active agencies; ANSA, 804 new tourist guides; Viator Operator Resources, How reviews impact your business. OTA commission percentages are not officially published by Viator and GetYourGuide and derive from industry surveys: they should be verified case by case. The percentages proposed for the network are indicative and are defined in writing in each collaboration.

TourLeaderPro Network — contact us if you are a tour operator looking for a partner in Italy, or introduce yourself if you are a professional who wants to make the phone ring for others too.