What is the difference between arrivals and guest-nights?

Arrivals count the people who begin a stay during the month; guest-nights count the nights those people spend at the site. A family of four staying seven nights is 4 arrivals and 28 guest-nights. It is the most frequent counting error at campgrounds, because the software shows bookings and the survey asks for people.

Do I have to report the months when the campground is closed?

Yes. The survey is monthly and silence does not equal zero: closed months have to be declared as such, or reported as zero, according to what your region's platform requires. A month that is not transmitted stays open and comes back as a reminder.

How do you count a seasonal guest who keeps the pitch from April to October?

As one arrival in the month the stay begins, and as actual guest-nights in the following months. Guest-nights are the nights genuinely spent, not the days the pitch is committed: if the caravan sits there but nobody sleeps in it, those nights are not guest-nights.

Are bungalows and mobile homes reported together with pitches?

It depends on how your business is classified and how your region's form is built. In many cases capacity has to be stated separating pitches from accommodation units, each with its bed spaces. The principle to hold on to is that declared capacity must match your licence, not what you use in practice.

How is guests' origin recorded?

For Italian customers you state the region of residence, for foreign ones the country of residence — not their nationality. A German family resident in Italy is counted among the Italians of their region.

What do I risk if I do not transmit?

The survey is part of the national statistical programme and responding is compulsory under legislative decree 322/1989. Failure to respond carries an administrative penalty, with amounts that vary depending on whether the respondent is an individual or a company. In practice, the region's reminders arrive before any penalty.

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ISTAT and ROSS1000 at a campground: how arrivals, guest-nights and pitches are really counted

2026-08-18

The ISTAT tourist-flow report is not complicated to file. It is complicated to count.

The form asks four things: how many people arrived, how many nights they spent, where they come from, and how big the site is. At a hotel those are four trivial questions. At a campground with pitches, fixed accommodation, seasonal guests, groups and visitors coming and going, each of the four has a grey area.

This article tries to remove the grey areas one by one.

First things first: this is not Alloggiati Web

Worth saying, because the confusion is common and costs months of wrong reports.

	Alloggiati Web	ISTAT survey
Who it serves	State Police — public security	National statistical system
What it asks	Who slept there, with ID	How many, how many nights, from where
When	Within 24 hours of arrival	Monthly
Where it goes	Alloggiati Web portal	Your region's platform
Legal basis	Art. 109 TULPS	Legislative decree 322/1989, national statistical programme

They are two separate obligations, with two separate channels and two separate deadlines. Having filed one does not put you in order with the other, and neither can be derived automatically from the other without going through your stay data.

Arrivals and guest-nights: the error 90% of campgrounds make

It is the definition that looks obvious and is not.

Arrival = a person who begins a stay during the month. Counted once, in the month they arrive.
Guest-night = one night spent by one person.

A family of four on a pitch from 3 to 10 August:

4 arrivals (not one, not one booking)
28 guest-nights (4 people × 7 nights)

The typical error comes from the software: the bookings screen shows one booking, and that becomes "one arrival". Do it all season and you declare a quarter of your real arrivals. It is an error that does not hurt you immediately, but it distorts your municipality's statistics, and when the municipality uses those numbers to set the tourist tax or plan its tourism promotion, you are working against yourself.

The stay that straddles two months

A booking from 28 July to 4 August produces:

the arrival in the month of July (that is where the stay begins)
the guest-nights split: 4 nights in July, 3 nights in August

You do not move it all to August because that is where most of the stay falls, and you do not count the arrival twice. A campground, which lives on long stays straddling mid-August, meets this case every year on dozens of bookings.

Seasonal guests: where the statistics come away from reality

This is the campground-specific point, the one no generic guide addresses.

A seasonal guest keeps the pitch from April to October. On paper that is 180 days of occupation. In reality that caravan is lived in at weekends, for two weeks in August and a few bank holidays.

Guest-nights are the nights genuinely spent by people, not the days the pitch is committed. If you declare 180 guest-nights for a seasonal guest who slept there 45 nights, you are inflating your site's figures by a factor of four.

And then there is the part everyone forgets: the seasonal guest's visitors are arrivals and guest-nights. The grandchildren spending the July week, the friends staying on Saturday. They are people spending the night at your site, and as such they count — in the statistical survey exactly as in the police report.

In practice, seasonal guests need a record of actual nights. It is not an extra obligation: it is the same data you need for the tourist tax.

Capacity: pitches, accommodation units, bed spaces

The survey also asks how big the site is, and it is the section where campgrounds get it wrong out of carelessness.

Three principles to hold on to:

1. The capacity you declare is the licensed one. If the licence says 180 pitches and you use 172 because the back row has become storage, you declare 180. The form asks for the size of the site, not its usage.

2. Pitches and accommodation units are different things. A tent pitch and a six-berth bungalow are not the same unit of measurement. In many regional forms they have to be stated separately, with the corresponding bed spaces. Adding them into a single number makes the data unusable.

3. Capacity changes during the season, the declaration does not. If you only open the tent area from June to September, the licensed size stays the same: it is guest-nights that describe the usage, not capacity.

Origin: residence, not nationality

Blunt rule: Italians by region of residence, foreigners by country of residence.

The German family who have lived in Bolzano for twenty years count among the Italians of Trentino-Alto Adige. The Italian resident in Switzerland counts among the foreigners, Switzerland.

At a campground with a strong foreign clientele this figure is also the only serious way you have of understanding where your revenue really comes from. It is worth collecting properly, not just for the form.

The regional platforms: what to expect

The survey is national, the collection is regional. Depending on where you are you will face ROSS1000 or a regional platform with another name, with different forms, deadlines and levels of courtesy.

What varies from region to region:

the monthly deadline — generally in the first days of the following month, but the precise date is set by your region
the format — manual entry, file upload, or transmission from your software
the level of detail — some regions ask for data beyond the basic model
what happens if you skip a month — from an automatic reminder to silence

Two things are the same everywhere, and they are the ones worth sorting out:

Closed months have to be declared. Silence does not equal zero. A campground closed from October to March still has to close those months on the platform, otherwise they stay open and come back as reminders at the worst possible time, that is in May while you are reopening.

Credentials expire. As with Alloggiati Web, the first login of the season belongs before opening, not on 5 May with the first form due.

Why it is worth doing properly, obligation aside

There is a selfish reason, and for once it is not rhetoric.

The numbers you transmit feed the statistics of your municipality, your province and your region. Those statistics are used to decide where tourism promotion funding goes, how the tourist tax is set, and how much weight the open-air sector carries in local tourism planning.

An area where campgrounds report badly looks smaller than it is. And a sector that looks small gets treated as small when resources are handed out.

Then there is the direct return: guest-nights by type and by month, with origin, are exactly the data you use to set next year's rates. If you find that tent pitches account for 70% of July guest-nights but 20% of revenue, you have just found the lever to work on.

Monthly checklist, five minutes

Arrivals: people, not bookings.
Guest-nights: actual nights, seasonal guests and their visitors included.
Stays straddling two months: arrival in the starting month, guest-nights split.
Origin: residence, not nationality.
Capacity: the licensed one, with pitches and accommodation units separate.
Closed months: declared, not skipped.
Transmission receipt: filed alongside the Alloggiati Web ones.

If the guest's data is entered once — at booking time — arrivals, guest-nights and origins come out on their own, and the monthly form becomes a check instead of a reconstruction. On CampinGate that is how it works: see how pitches and stays are managed.