Italy welcomes tens of millions of visitors every year. But self-drive touring, the kind where you plan a route, pick up a car, and spend a week discovering the country at your own pace, remains a surprisingly small corner of the market.
It's not hard to understand why. Italian roads have a reputation. ZTL zones are confusing. Tolls are unpredictable. And the sheer volume of things worth seeing makes the planning feel impossible before you've even started. So, most people default to guided tours, trains, or the well-worn Rome-Florence-Venice circuit. The countryside – the lake roads, the mountain passes, the vineyards you'd never find in a guidebook – stays just out of reach.
Nordic Visitor thinks that's a problem worth solving.
The Icelandic-founded travel company, best known for expertly planned self-drive and small-group tours across Northern Europe, has opened a permanent office in Rome and launched a full range of Italy self-drive tours.
This isn't a tentative market test. There's a team on the ground, a growing portfolio of over 40 itineraries including multi-country Alpine routes, and a bet that self-drive Italy, despite being one of the most beautiful driving countries in Europe, remains a fragmented, underserved category – with no brand yet owning it the way operators have long owned guided tours or rail packages.
Nordic Visitor's own data tells a consistent story: the thing stopping people from driving Italy isn't the driving. It's everything that comes before it.
The planning. The route decisions. The nagging worry that you'll end up stuck in traffic outside Siena in August when you could have been on a quiet Umbrian back road. For the kind of travellers Nordic Visitor tends to attract – experienced, quality-conscious, typically aged 35 to 74, Italy is already the dream. What's been missing is someone to make the logistics disappear.
That's the pitch: not a booking platform, not an algorithm generating an itinerary from a prompt, but what the company calls 'a friend in your destination.' A local expert who plans every kilometre, knows the hotels and the back roads personally, and picks up the phone when something changes. No AI planner has ever rerouted a traveller away from a flooded mountain pass at 7 am on a Tuesday – but Nordic Visitor’s team has.
Technology can help people plan faster, but it doesn't help them plan better. Italy demands local knowledge. People who live there, care about the details, and show up when it matters.
- Sigfús Steingrímsson, CEO
It's a deliberately old-fashioned idea in an industry racing toward automation. Whether that's a strength or a limitation probably depends on how your last AI-planned holiday went.
But why Rome? Why now?
The city is an administrative tangle: seasonally volatile, logistically demanding, and notoriously difficult to coordinate around from a distance. Nordic Visitor's logic is straightforward: if you can plan well from Rome, you can plan well anywhere in the country.
The office sits alongside existing bases in Reykjavik, Stockholm, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Munich, extending the company's local-expert model into its sixth European region.
The timing isn't accidental either. International demand for Italian holidays rose by nearly 18% over the summer of 2025, according to Italy's national tourism board (ENIT). Foreign arrivals hit 104 million for the year, up 8.7% on 2024, according to Italy's Ministry of the Interior. The numbers are moving, and so are traveller expectations.
The numbers are moving, and so are traveller expectations. More people want planning they can trust, not just planning they can do themselves.
What makes this expansion more than a new pin on a map is what Nordic Visitor says it's bringing with it.
The company talks about a "Nordic ethos" and while that phrase could easily slide into marketing territory, the operational detail behind it is specific enough to be worth paying attention to. Operations teams personally vet every supplier. Accommodation choices favour accredited, locally run properties over global chains.
In Iceland, the head office runs entirely on renewable energy. In Edinburgh and Munich, the teams work from sustainability-focused spaces. And in Rome, the new office is based at Industrie Fluviali – Ecosistema Cultura, a co-working hub in the Ostiense district.
Housed in a repurposed early-1900s wool laundry, Industrie Fluviali was built around social, cultural, and environmental sustainability. There's an eco-friendly bistro, plans for a sensory garden and hydroponic vegetable patch, and full accessibility across 2,000 square metres.
The space is run by PINGO, a female-led social cooperative, and actively participates in neighbourhood regeneration projects across Ostiense.
We could have taken a conventional office, but being part of Industrie Fluviali means we're embedded in the neighbourhood, not just operating from it. We walk the streets, we know the suppliers personally, and when something shifts on the ground, we're already on it.
- Lisa Zacchia, Regional Manager, Italy
Nordic Visitor is staking a clear position: that the future of travel in complex destinations belongs to companies with people on the ground, not platforms in the cloud.
Whether the bet pays off depends on something the company is candid about: awareness.
Outside the Nordic market, most people don't yet know Nordic Visitor does Italy at all. Converting that into consideration, and consideration into bookings, in a destination where the company is still building its name – that's the challenge.
But the office is open. The team is hired. The roads are waiting. And if you've ever stared at a map of Tuscany and thought I wish someone would just tell me where to go – well. That's rather the point.
