The Albergo Diffuso Model: Community-based hospitality for a sustained competitive advantage

The hospitality model called Albergo Diffuso (AD), or scattered hotel, has been engneered by Mr Giancarlo Dall'Ara and described by The New York Times as a way of bringing life back to historic towns and rural hamlets by utilizing unused rooms for tourism. This simple but genial model devised in Italy in the mid-90’s received an award from the UNDP for its sustainability, but despite the spread of AD’s, no peer-reviewed books have previously been published in English focusing on this innovation. In this book, the author therefore begins by exploring the AD as a community-based hospitality model, examining both its pros and cons. He then considers conviviality, sense of security, and other factors that Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to as luxuries of our time for urban dwellers. These represent the key pre-requisites a location must possess to be deemed suitable for this innovation. Next, investors and co-interested private, public and not-for-profit associations are provided with a structured framework to help them achieve a defensible competitive advantage by harnessing the economic potential of valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable (VRIN) resources. The final section assesses the AD as a business model, evaluating various aspects at the heart of any business plan.