LatitudesMag est un magazine de voyages sur Internet qui nous change complétement du format habituel et nous ouvre d'autres prespectives pour la découverte des destinations touristiques.

Lucio Rossi nous en parle ainsi que du Web 2.0 et ses applications dans le monde de l'édition touristique.




Lucio, can you tell some information about you?
I am 40 years old and my life's passion has always been travelling primarily as a hobby and then I tried to change this into work. This is why I chose to begin working as a photo-journalist for tourism magazines. Thanks to this job I have travelled to about 70 countries.




You manage a great travel magazine, LatitudesMag,
Can you tell us some fact about it and the profil of people who read your nice magazine ?
LatitudesMag is produced by a team of journalists and photographers with
consolidated experience in the traditional editorial industry, that have accepted
the challenge of joining with web professionals, art directors and animation
designers.
It all began about a year and a half ago; in the beginning it was like a challenge, we wanted to see if we were capable of producing a magazine where the photographs had a great impact and if the magazine could become a favourite among internet users.

LatitudesMag targets readers mainly between the ages of 20 and 55, who lead
an active and dynamic life with a strong interest in the world of travel. Who
use internet daily to look for information and for communication,

You are involve in other etourism or Internet project, some news about
this?
For the moment we are waiting to see if this iniziative is economically sustainable as we have a few projects on the table to create other like magazines, dealing with different subjects.




Can you give us some higlights about your goals with LatitudesMag !
We now have confirmation that our format is successful and our readers appreciate our magazine. They particularly like the big photos that have never before been available on internet, as well as the music and the flash animations that add a sophisticated creative touch to our product. A completely different approach in getting to know the world by being transported to a destination, in a way that the other traditional printed travel magazines can never offer. At present, we are going through the most difficult phase; launching Latitudes in a capillary fashion to include as vast a public as possible. For this reason we decided right from the beginning to offer Latitudes in English as well as Italian thereby crossing all borders outside our country.

What are your taste for:

Travel:
What I like most are the big open spaces and above all nature in all its forms. Therefore, National Parks protected areas and natural oasis but above all, over the last few years, I have appreciated learning about a country by travelling along its rivers, it is an extraordinary point of view as you see things that along its roads you would never imagine existed.

Travel destination:
Central and South America are the countries that interest me the most, I spent almost a year in Argentina where I learnt to appreciate the habits and rhythms of life at those latitudes. There are still some countries that I want to visit such as Chile and am impatient to satisfy this desire.

Hotel :
These days all the big hotels in the large cities around the world provide every possibile comfort, despite this I prefer to stay in a small typical bed and breakfast or a small hotel set in a converted historical building. Don't miss an opportunity to stay in the Solares de Portugal, that were houses owned by the Portuguese nobility from the XV and XVI centuries that have been converted into charming luxury guest houses.

Internet is going faster and we talk now about Web 2.0, what do you
think about this evolution in the tourism market place ?
Web 2.0, due to the diffusion of broad band above all, we are thinking of benefiting to the fullest from users interaction with Latitudes who could give us their experiences relative to a particular destination even if it is to make note of a special hotel or restaurant. Therefore, in the tourism sector there would be an evolution that would transform many simple tourists from passive users into active travellers.

We see important impact of news technologies (RSS, AJAX, podcast, blog,
socialnetworking tools, etc), what is your point of view ?These permit the users to have access to more unfiltered information which they could share with other users, therefore all these democratic innovations on the net are welcomed.

Some project with WEB 2.0 for LatitudesMag ?
We are studying the means of giving users the possibility of integrating more with Latitudes but for the moment, I cannot go into details.




Blogs are also a new media and new part of Internet, we talk about "blogosphère". What about you and the blogs trend ?
The negative aspect of the development of blogs is that they could provide the impulse to diffuse trash, there must be a secure way of verifying the sources, regarding news items for example. Personally I have not got into using the blogs much even if there are a couple that I visit every now and again.

For media travel, do you feel something is different for europe
Customer than american ou asian customers? What about the big trends in this area?
These are three different cultures therefore my opinion is that Asia is the continent of the future given the enormous economical potential of these countries their middle class will become a class of travellers. The Americans are big spenders but for the ultras famous destinations even the middle class find the money. Europeans are the most demanding travellers which is most probably due to the fact they are more informed about their chosen destination before even booking their vacations.