City dropdownplus ISTAT code mapping for Italian legal reporting.

PROBLEM

For Italian properties, guest profile data feeds mandatory legal reporting (ISTAT/police).

The City field in Mews is free text, both in the back office and in the Online Check-in, with no link to the official Italian municipality list and no consistency check against postal code or province.

As a result, guests and staff enter city names in countless variants: colloquial names ("Reggio Emilia" vs the official "Reggio nell'Emilia"), accented vs apostrophe spellings (Ciriè / CIRIE'), German names for South Tyrol municipalities (Algund vs Lagundo), bilingual concatenations (Aosta Aoste, Bolzano Bozen), hamlets instead of municipalities (Mestre vs Venezia), typos, province acronyms inside the field, curly apostrophes from mobile keyboards, and so on.

Every variant is rejected downstream by the statistical reporting validation, and homonymous municipalities (e.g. Castro, which exists in both Bergamo and Lecce provinces) are rejected as ambiguous even when province and postal
code are correctly filled in, because the name alone is transmitted.

IMPACT

Our property currently reviews and manually corrects guest city data EVERY DAY before each submission. Some municipalities are rejected in every spelling we have tested, forcing us to enter a neighbouring municipality just to unblock the legally required daily submission, meaning the data we report to the authorities is knowingly inaccurate.

This affects every Mews property in Italy subject to ISTAT/police reporting, not just us (support cases 00638274 and 00675059 document our history).

PROPOSED SOLUTION

1. Replace the free-text City field with a searchable dropdown/autocomplete tied to the official Italian municipality list (ISTAT), for Italian addresses, in both back office and Online Check-in.

2. Store and transmit the 6-digit ISTAT municipality code alongside (or instead of) the literal name. Code-based mapping eliminates at once: spelling variants, accent and apostrophe issues, historical vs current denominations, and homonym ambiguity.

3. Use the already-collected province and postal code to disambiguate homonymous municipalities and to warn on inconsistent city/postal-code combinations at data entry time.

4. Keep the list updated with ISTAT administrative changes (mergers and renames happen every year).

BENEFIT

Zero-touch, always-valid legal reporting for all Italian properties; no more daily
manual correction; no more legally questionable workarounds; fewer support cases on this topic.

The same structured-city approach could later serve other countries with similar municipal reporting requirements (Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic...).