In the last few days, we have all read the news that Massimiliano Magrini resigned from Google Italia to create an new VC / Incubator claiming that it will transform Milan in the new Sillicon Valley.

But what is the situation in Italy right now from a Start-up point of view?

Italian start-ups are nearly absent in the international panorama. Even the most interesting ones, and there are several, are all focusing on the Italian market only. Some of them do succeed in italy, but they never manage to gain relevance outside the italian borders.

There are, naturally, several factor at play, but here are what I have found to be the major obstacles:

1) Lack of funding.  The italian banking system is not helping us at all. They give money only to companies that already have it. Venture capital companies are non-existant in the italian market. Recently there was an interesting initiatives of Telecom Italia “Working Capital”

2) Enterpreneurs’ lack of vision. There are outstanding individuals in Italy that work in the internet sector. However many of them have never worked abroad, and in my opinion lack an international mind-frame, focusing solely on the Italian market.

3) Lack of qualified employees. Babotel has been trying to hire qualified professionals in Italy in the last few months but it has proven very difficult to find young and qualified professionals in the market. The best professional tend to work as freelance doing small consulting work.

4) Bureaucracy. It is still very difficult to run a start up in italy. I have also run start ups in the UK, but the amount time I spend with bureaucracy here in Italy, is ovewelming. Almost 30% of my work is dedicated to it.

In spite of all of the above, however, I am happy to say that I am starting to see changes, especially over the last few months. I see more and more people taking risks trying to launch their start ups and develop their ideas. This is a very encouraging sign, that may, I hope, one day bring about the so much needed changes.

Let’s see what the future brings us.

Choosing the right hotel booking engine is becoming really important as it has a strong impact in the online strategy of the hotel.

Several companies are offering the technology to be able to book a room online but i don’t think that it is available any technological solution that satisfy the hotel and the user.

All the solutions on the market have usuability problems making difficult the life of the user that is willing to book the room online. I was surprised to find out that many technological solutions have limitations and do not allow to enter third party tracking code. This is an important limitation as the hotel often need third party tracking code to be able to run their webanalytics or their affiliate marketing programme.

In addition it is really important to implement the third party booking engine correctly in your hotel website. It is crucial that the booking engine is available in all the pages of the hotel website and the booking mask should be placed on the top left corner as it is the most visible part.

Choosing the right booking engine it is difficult as you need to find the right technology but the right pricing as well.

The most important criteria that an hotelier should take in consideration when selecting an hotel booking engines are:

- an easy to use system for the user that doesn’t need more than 3 steps to book and doesn’t ask you information that you have already provided; sistema facile da usare per l’utente finale che non richieda piu’ di tre step per la prenotazione e non richieda all’utente informazioni che ha gia’ fornito

-Integration with an nline payment system

-  back end allowing a complex management of the hotel pricing allowing to implement yield management techniques;

- back end allowing to manage pricing and availability in all the main OTA’s (expedia, booking, venere) using the api or xml technology;

-  customizable system to be able to display the look and feel of the hotel main website;

- flexible technology allowing to insert third party tracking code;