Since 1 August, Italy's first website to help you plan an electric holiday, hotel by hotel and restaurant by restaurant, has been up and running: it's called eviaggio.it. It is a platform that collects and lists all the hotels equipped with charging facilities (starting with Tesla Destination Chargers), showing their features and accessibility. Although it is a website and not an app, eviaggio.it can also be browsed and used on a mobile phone.
It was created by Nicola Carlon, a computer engineer from Desenzano sul Garda, after experiencing first-hand how far behind the Italian hotel industry still is in this respect (read about our experience). Carlon is a manager at a company specialising in industrial robotics. For a year and two months he has been travelling around Northern Italy in his Tesla Model 3. He is enthusiastic about it: «I've already driven 40,000 km, saving at least 4,000 euros».
«I travel a lot and I discovered that…»
«As I travel a lot, including for work _ he tells us _, I've often found myself having to choose a hotel with charging, so as to travel with peace of mind and not stress the battery with expensive rapid charging». He immediately realised, however, that charging is almost never listed among the services hotels offer. «I always rely on booking.com and TripAdvisor _ he adds_, but on both platforms the charging information is unclear». Many hotels that advertise an “EV charging” service actually mean bicycles and e-scooters, or even list public charging points they know nothing about as their own. You then risk having to charge all night from a Schuko socket, which «isn't ideal, not least for safety reasons».
«In short _ he concludes _ I realised there was no way of bringing together hotels and restaurants verified by our niche of users (fortunately a shrinking one). And that's how eviaggio.it was born».
How the eviaggio.it platform works
The eviaggio.it platform lets you add destinations and fill in a series of fields useful to those travelling electric. These include the connector type, the power output, whether the service is free or not and compatibility with cars of all makes. You can also add the property's Booking.com and TripAdvisor links, «because it's always useful to read reviews from non-electric users» explains Carlon.
What's more, unlike other apps for finding charging points, destinations can be reviewed (by users) and also claimed by their owners. In other words, owners can take over their page on the site, update the information and reply to reviews.
A free service for users and owners
The service is free, for both users and owners. «My aim is not to make a profit _ explains the manager, who is an employee and doesn't even have a VAT number _ but to create an open, independent community. At the moment there aren't even any ads». However, eviaggio relies on Google Maps, which charges a fee beyond certain usage levels. In the future, therefore, it may need to generate «a minimum of revenue to keep going. In that case I'll decide whether to accept advertising. But he stresses: «My intention is not to make money, but to support those who, like me, are entering the world of sustainable mobility».
An appeal: share your experiences
Carlon adds an appeal: «The platform is growing but it needs everyone's help to establish itself, in the hope that one day it will no longer be needed because every hotel and restaurant will have a charging point».
[Source] “Hotels and restaurants with charging? eviaggio.it will tell you” in VaiElettrico, 14 August 2020, Massimo Degli Esposti, https://www.vaielettrico.it/hotel-e-ristoranti-con-ricarica-ve-lo-dice-eviaggio-it/
