Alessandra Prainte

Alessandra Priante is the President of ENIT SpA, the Italian National Tourism Agency, and Co-Chairman of the Advisory Board of SIGA Europe (Sports Integrity Global Alliance), the leading international organisation promoting integrity in sport. She is also Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University (Rome), where she contributes to the Corporate Strategy Research Centre and teaches in the areas of tourism economics and international governance.

As an Economist with extensive international and diplomatic experience, she served as Director for Europe at the United Nations Agency for Tourism (UN Tourism), being the first woman and first Italian in the agency's history to hold such a prestigious position. In this role, she managed the agency's most significant region, comprising 43 Member States representing 51% of the global tourism market. During her tenure, she enhanced Member States' satisfaction by introducing dynamic and effective projects and work methods, engaging the global private sector significantly, thus contributing to increased financial contributions to the agency.

Alessandra also adeptly managed the pandemic period - the most severe crisis for the global tourism sector - spearheading impactful initiatives such as the Global Tourism Crisis Committee and various global technical committees, positioning UN Tourism at the heart of European and global institutions. During this productive professional period, she positioned Italy at the center of global initiatives, from the global communication campaign for tourism recovery (#RestartTourism) launched on July 1, 2020, in Rome, to the organization of the first World Summit of Youth on Sustainable Tourism in Sorrento.

She is a graduate of Bocconi University in Business Economics, with two Master degrees including an executive MBA from Luiss Guido Carli University, fluent in six foreign languages (bilingual in Italian and English) and with a great passion for the public sector, she resumed the reins of the national tourism policy in 2015 after an exceptional five-year diplomatic mission in the Persian Gulf as a special envoy of the Government. The diplomatic project, that she herself conceived, aimed at promoting Italy's cultural and educational heritage in the UAE, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain.