engleski

Tools to enhance sustainable year-round tourism in the Mediterranean islands

Coastal and maritime areas as tourist destinations affect the area’s overall development, creating opportunities for new jobs and additional incomes for locals. The Mediterranean is one of the most visited tourist destinations characterised by high seasonality. Project WINTER MED (Winter Islands Network for all year round Tourism ExpeRience in the MEDiterranean) is a modular project co- financed by the Interreg MED Programme. The project aims to respond to the main challenges related to maritime and coastal tourism sustainability to reduce the high seasonality of tourist demand in island destinations. The WINTER MED project aims to create an integrated transnational strategy to transition from the overutilisation of a summer tourist destination to a responsible and sustainable all-year-round offer, emphasising tourism activities year-round on the Mediterranean islands. The project started in November 2019 and will run for 32 months, involving eleven partners from six countries (Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, France and Spain). Its main goal is to use previously developed tools and good practices to create action plans for regions involved as well as general transnational plan. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictive measures, partners have continued their activities in the new form of virtual meetings and webinars. This paper presents the work on the project in the online environment and the main challenges we have encountered in the implementation. From June to October 2020, there were 12 webinars organised to present selected 13 good practices and tools from the previous nine projects. The presented good practices are related to the following themes: managing, measuring and monitoring, strategic planning, indicators and carrying capacity, also taking into account sustainable ways of mobility in the destination, marketing activities including promotional campaigns and tourism itineraries, energy, water and waste management strategies, interoperability information, forms of fundraising and capitalisation. These good practices are grouped within six labels: Governance, Evaluations, Database, Service for tourism, Training and learning, and ICT. The result of selected good practices with applicable tools can achieve the objective of sustainable tourist island destinations year-round. After each of the presented webinars, an evaluation questionnaire was sent to participants using an online platform for survey development. The evaluation of the webinars was performed with the aim to collect general data on webinars and gather opinions of webinar participants on their usefulness. The evaluation process was carried out after each webinar. The results of the webinar’s evaluation process were shared with projects partners and were the project outputs. The experience and solutions applied in dealing with the problems of lack of personal interaction and overall saturation with online content will provide valuable experience in finding the optimal approach in using digital technologies in the implementation of development projects in the tourism sector.

sustainable tourism ; seasonality ; maritime and coastal tourism ; COVID-19 pandemic

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