The tourism sector plays a significant and growing role in the EU's economic performance. Along with the increase in short domestic trips, destinations away from mass tourism have become more important. The trends highlighted raise the need for new approaches.
The first of these is sustainable tourism from an environmental and social point of view. Community-based sustainable tourism project approaches need to be part of a broader community development strategy and carefully planned with community members. Non-mass tourism destinations provide opportunities for different types of tourism, such as agritourism, ecotourism, geotourism, rural tourism, responsible tourism and special interest tourism. All these are a good basis for supporting local communities and the environment, while also supporting climate-neutral tourism.
Sustainable tourism is mostly run by family businesses or micro-enterprises, who have good experience in their traditional tourism business but need additional skills and competences on the dissemination of their services through the community-based circular tourism approach.
Based on the needs that emerged, the RE-CONNECT project identified a clear need to accelerate the development of community-based tourism competences and skills in unusual destinations, implementing a greener and digital development approach to ensure more sustainable tourism with a circular tourism approach. The solution offered by RECONNECT is to address the given needs and challenges by developing and implementing a toolkit for skills and behaviour development for the benefit of operators, local SMEs, NGOs, suppliers and local government.
Being in line with the priorities of environmental sustainability and climate goals as well as digital transformations, the project aims to increase the skills of local tourism communities on greener and digital tourism products and services through:
- Developing a viable inter-regional digital ecosystem of local tourism communities based on the idea of circular tourism;
- Increasing the skills of the tourism workforce on sustainable tourism in offbeat destinations;
- Developing a knowledge base to accelerate the co-creation of new innovative products and services.
The RE-CONNECT partnership will implement the following activities:
- Developing a Collaborative HUB on Circular Tourism - a platform for eco-sustainable tourism solutions, cooperation and knowledge sharing. The HUB is dedicated to local tourism staff (hosts, suppliers, operators) to share their experience, challenges and best working practices within a common network. The interactive hub will provide a space for sharing knowledge and ideas, issues and valuable information related to the development of circular tourism.
- Skills development for greener and digital tourism, through the development and testing of a training curriculum on circular tourism of offbeat destinations
- Development of a co-creation package on circular tourism: a knowledge package (guidelines) will be developed focusing on how to accelerate circular tourism projects, products or services through a co-creation process.
- In addition to the main project outputs, a series of training activities, as well as collaborative skills development activities, learning by doing, competence development activities will be implemented, with a broad involvement of all stakeholders of the tourism ecosystem of offbeat destinations.
The project, co-financed by the programme Erasmus+ of the European Union lasts 24 months. The first meeting took place in Catania on 31 May - 1 June 2022 in the presence of the partners:
- KDRIÜ Közép-dunántúli Regionális Innovációs Ügynökség Nonprofit Kft. – Hungary
- MB "Efekto grupe" – Lithuania
- RAZVOJNI CENTER SRCA SLOVENIJE DOO - Slovenia
- Cooperation in Emerging Countries - Italy
- Obcina Radenci - Slovenia
- Comharchumann Forbartha Ionad Deirbhle Teo. - Ireland
