Interview with Roberta Milano

Advisory Board | Food & Wine Tourism

Roberta Milano – Lecturer, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart | Milan

In a few lines, from your point of view and based on what you have gathered so far, what are the main developments that you think could be presented at BTO11? So, an invitation for the audience to take part.
The speed of change in tourism is exponential, as the complexity increases year by year. BTO is an event and also a beacon, for orienting itself in digital transformation – to understand, to study, to develop skills and to learn how to act.

In your workgroup, what do you deal with specifically?
I am the coordinator of the Food & Wine Group. We are working on translating the challenge of connecting tourism, food and wine and innovation into a scientific programme. This programme also addresses a new audience for BTO – restaurateurs, producers, intermediaries and governance in the food and wine chain. It is no simple challenge, as tourism and food and wine all too often travel along parallel tracks. Our goal is both cultural and educational – to demonstrate the strong connection between the two sectors, to unite the digital narratives of products and territories and to identify the best practices that, simply with their example, indicate the roads we can also travel today.

Destination, Digital Strategy, Food and Wine Tourism and Hospitality – the main topics of BTO11. Your contribution will be incorporated into the scientific programming schedule. The underlying theme is SMART. Can you help us to break this down from your perspective and with regards to the theme you are handling?
Smart Tourism connected to Smart Agrifood – our goal is not technology per se but technology as a factor that enables change. The best technology is always unseen (but is there!). We will try to understand how technology can improve the experience in food and wine tourism. If “Smart” is that set of intelligent practices that help citizens and tourists improve their experience or enjoyment of a particular place, we will focus on this trait for Food & Wine – from the online restaurant bookings undergoing rapid growth to the first blockchain experiments in the sector.

Do you have anything else to add?
I would like to leave you with a quote that I really love: “who sows utopia reaps reality” (Carlo Petrini).