How and when was your business born?
According to some research we have done, the Albergo delle Drapperie that we represent today was an inn with rooms as early as the mid-nineteenth century.
The history, authenticity, and beauty of this hotel in Bologna, located in an area of the city’s historic center capable of leaving tourists from all over the world speechless, captured our father’s heart from the very first moment. We are talking about 2013, the year our family decided to embrace the Albergo delle Drapperie project without any hesitation.
Since then, all our commitment and our dreams have taken shape in this little jewel. In 2018, my sister Letizia joined us after various experiences developed in the field of hospitality and the creation and management of events and banquets.
Today the family is complete, and for all intents and purposes, we can consider Albergo delle Drapperie as one of us, the fifth member of our family unit.
What services do you offer?
Ours is a 3-star hotel with 21 rooms, small, intimate, and cozy. A true boutique hotel, with rooms that differ from one another, each with frescoed ceilings and classic furnishings in an Art Nouveau style. The structure recalls and proposes the charm and warmth of the past, but with everything that cannot be missing in a hotel that is constantly in step with the times.
In the heart of the historic center, near Via Indipendenza and literally a few steps from Piazza Maggiore and the Two Towers, the hotel boasts a perfect location.
We offer accommodation in Single Rooms, Double Rooms, or in evocative Junior Suites, and breakfast. This is our standard service.
In addition to this, we make ourselves available from the first contact with the client for the creation of tailor-made experiences in the city of Bologna. We can organize guided tours, transfers, personalized excursions, or simply recommend the right itinerary for every type of guest, whether it be shopping, food and wine tours, or discovering the city’s astounding cultural offerings.
So yours is a family-run hotel.
What does it mean for you to administer and manage an accommodation facility at this level on a daily basis?
Managing an accommodation facility is not simple, and I understand that for those who have never worked in a hotel, it is almost impossible to understand how much work goes into the creation and offering of a stay, an overnight stay, a valuable experience in a city that is not your own and that welcomes you for a usually short period.
The hotel lives day and night, in a continuous cycle. A business dedicated to hospitality renews itself, changes, breathes, and adapts to different needs and stories every day and several times a day. The hotel is the ultimate realization of the spirit of welcome; it is hospitality turned into a business, and if all these mechanisms are controlled by members of the same family, well, you will understand how things can sometimes represent a significant challenge and a delicate commitment. But at the same time, this challenge and this commitment allow us—mother, father, brother, and sister—to rediscover ourselves even more united every day, to experience great satisfaction and often true emotions, which are nothing other than the affectionate greetings, the thanks, and the recognition of the quality of our work that we receive from our guests.
And we experience all of this together, we share it among ourselves; it is our pride.
And then, it is said that the goal of a hotel is to make the guest feel at home (or better!)… and who can convey the sense, care, and warmth of a home better than a real family?
How important is the relationship with customers to you?
We sell experiences. Everything we do, think, and coordinate daily is functional to the relationship established with the guest. The guests of our hotel are the absolute protagonists of the business because they experience it in real-time and at 360 degrees. Our vision of hospitality, our style, simply reflects what we ourselves look for when we travel. Contact, exchange, authentic immersion in a reality that is far from our comfort zone.
We seek dialogue with people who know how to advise us, take care of us, and provide us with those small attentions that are precious when you are in another city, another country, or another continent. Beyond the specific characteristics of the rooms, the services offered, the beauty of a view or a decoration, which are all very important details for a hotel, what ultimately remains in the heart of the traveler and gives value to their experience is human contact.
Enter a hotel as customers and leave as friends. We firmly believe in this, and we believe that now more than ever, this aspect is important.
Entrepreneurs from Perugia in Bologna. How have you found yourselves in this city?
Certainly, the spirit of the people of Perugia, and of Umbrians in general, is tenacious, genuine, and courageous. We Perugians are not used to showing off or talking too much about ourselves. We do. Concretely. Perugia is a very different city, but in some aspects also very similar to Bologna. For this reason, as entrepreneurs from Perugia who have curated, started, and managed accommodation businesses throughout the country, from Trentino to Sicily, we can say without a shadow of a doubt that the territory of Bologna is the one where we have felt most at home, the one with which we have interacted with the most satisfaction, both from a human and a professional point of view.
Growing, caring for, and managing a hotel in Bologna, as non-Bolognese and considering the excellent level of competition, is a constant challenge and, for us, an inexhaustible source of gratification and stimulation.
To conclude: Perugians are concrete, loyal, and hardworking. What they know, they do; and what they don’t know, they learn.
Our only problem is that there are few of us… otherwise we would have already conquered the world!
