Whois & Analysis for globalblue.com

Milan (or; Milanese variant: Milan) is a city in Italy, capital of the Lombardy region, and the most populous metropolitan area and the second most populous comune in Italy.

The population of the city proper is 1,351,000, and that of the Metropolitan City of Milan is 3,209,000.

According to Eurostat, the commuting area has 4,252,000 inhabitants but its built-up-urban area (that stretches beyond the boundaries of the Metropolitan City of Milan), has a population estimated to be about 5,270,000 in, ranking 4th in the European Union.

The wider Milan metropolitan area, known as Greater Milan, is a polycentric metropolitan region that comprehends almost all the provinces of Lombardy, the Piedmont province of Novara, and some parts of the province of Piacenza.

Milan has a population of about 8,500,000 people.

It is the main industrial and financial centre of Italy and one of global significance.

In terms of GDP, it has the largest economy among European non-capital cities.

Milan is considered part of the Blue Banana and lies at the heart of one of the Four Motors for Europe.

Global Blue is a tourism shopping tax refund company headquartered in Nyon, Switzerland.

The company is best known for tax-free shopping, a VAT/GST refund product and also operates in dynamic currency conversion, marketing services, point-of-sale technology, retail staff education, and customer intelligence.

As of 2014, some 130 countries levy VAT/GST, about 50 offer to refund VAT/GST to tourists for private exports.

Spain, officially the Kingdom of Spain, is a sovereign state located on the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe, with two large archipelagos, the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea and the Canary Islands off the North African Atlantic coast, two cities Ceuta and Melilla in the North African mainland and several small islands in the Alboran Sea near the Moroccan coast.

Its mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with Gibraltar; to the north and northeast by France, Andorra, and the Bay of Biscay; and to the west and northwest by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean.

It is the only European country to have a border with an African country (Morocco) and its African territory accounts for nearly 5% of its population, mostly in the Canary Islands but also in Ceuta and Melilla.

Tax-free shopping (TFS) is the buying of goods in a foreign country and obtaining a refund of the sales tax which has been collected by the retailer on those goods.

The sales tax may be variously described as a sales tax, goods and services tax (GST), value added tax (VAT), or consumption tax.

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe.

It includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of, and has a largely temperate seasonal climate.

With about 82 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous member state of the European Union.

After the United States, it is the second most popular immigration destination in the world.

Germany's capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while its largest conurbation is the Ruhr (main centres: Dortmund and Essen).

Other major cities include Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Leipzig.