The tip of the iceberg. Tests of indirect measures of tourism in Alghero

The tip of the iceberg is a small evident part or aspect of something largely hidden . Nowadays the knowledge of tourism is like this tip. The official data just make a picture of emerged part, but what is the submerged one? The aim of the research is to try to give some sugges-tion for the investigation of submerged dimension of tourism using the experience of the Tourism Observatory of the Faculty of Architecture of Alghero. The intent is to illustrate methodologies and issues relevant for tourism in general and replicable in other situations. We try to as-sess the submerged size of the tourism phenomenon both on the sup-ply side (specifically the size of the receptive target) and on the de-mand side (the actual number of attendances).