A week under a tent with private bathroom and hairdryer, two beds, no trullo, no villa, total cost 238 thousand euros. We are in Ceglie Messapica, in the heart of Salento, and that figure (among other things already discounted by 20% compared to the starting price of 297,500) is one of the anomalies that Codacons has uncovered by sifting through the Booking.com offers for the week of August. The consumer association searched for various accommodations for two people between Friday 14 and Friday 21 August, from north to south, and the resulting picture looks more like a real estate price list than a summer holiday catalogue. In some places, Codacons warns, sleeping for a week costs as much as buying a medium-sized apartment, and flying to certain exotic destinations exceeds the average price of a small car.
The podium of luxury (or of the absurd)
The primacy belongs to Florence. An apartment in the heart of the historic center is offered at 297,714 euros for seven nights, in the version that provides for a refund in the event of cancellation by 31 July. They are close to 300 thousand euros for a couple, the same amount that in many Italian cities would be enough to close a deed. In second place is Salento, with the Ceglie Messapica tent already mentioned at the beginning, where the paradox becomes almost comical: what is proposed is not even the classic trullo, a UNESCO heritage site that has made Puglia famous, but a simple canvas structure equipped at the crazy price of 238 thousand euros. Rome closes the podium, where an apartment in Trastevere, again for two people and always in the central week of August, reaches 196,134 euros.
Neither the mountains nor the lakes offer discounts
The out-of-scale price lists do not spare any landscape. In Ponte di Legno, in Val Camonica, an apartment with a bedroom and a bathroom reaches 166,400 euros: the offer for a villa with swimming pool in Barcuzzi, on Lake Garda, is identical to the figure. That the same sum buys a room in the mountains or a villa with a swimming pool on the lake says a lot about the logic of these prices. Followed by Cortina d’Ampezzo, with a two-bedroom house costing 119,025 euros, and Capri, where a one-bedroom house costs 98,000. Near Lenno, on Lake Como, a villa with swimming pool costs 92,500 euros, in Posada, Sardinia, it stops at 85 thousand for the week of August.
The same dates, the same portal, another universe
On the same platforms and on the same days, prices coexist that seem to belong to two different economies. Codacons also looked for the bottom of the ranking and found it in Segrate, in the metropolitan area of Milan: 149 euros for an apartment, two people, the whole week. In Catania 203 are enough, in Pietralunga in Umbria 214 for a double room, 221 in Benevento, 223 in Villafranca Sicula, in the province of Agrigento. The coexistence of these two tracks tells how dynamic pricing works today in tourism, between high demand, reduced availability, an algorithm that pushes price lists upwards to the point of generating offers which, in most cases, remain unsold and fall as the date approaches.
Flights to the Pacific: over 21 thousand euros per ticket
The investigation also looks to the sky. If you are dreaming of the most remote islands for August, you will have to take into account figures which, as Codacons reminds us, are close to the value of a car. For the Republic of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific Ocean, a return trip in economy class from Rome between 14 and 21 August comes to 21,373 euros per passenger. For Apia, the capital of Samoa, up to 18,500 euros are needed, 17,300 for the Solomon Islands and Tonga, 16,400 for Fiji. Numbers that remain extreme cases, of course, but which photograph a market in which the same word, “holiday”, can be worth either 149 euros or three hundred thousand, it only depends on where, and when, you decide to click on the “book” button.
