First breakfast at World Tourism Day in Brussels
05 Oct 2023
Empowering small or early-stage sustainable cultural tourism businesses in Greece, Spain or Slovenia to scale and thrive in a constantly evolving market. This is the main objective of Creative Europe's CulturalDeTour Accelerator Program (CDTA), a 6-month acceleration initiative that offers an unprecedented opportunity for sustainable cultural tourism businesses to gain valuable insights and develop essential skills to grow and expand their businesses through digitization, technology and sustainability using the Earth-Centered Design Methodology.
This was announced at the event: "CulturalDeTour Forum: cross-border cooperation for regional and innovative tourism with EU (European Union) funds", a side event of the EU Regions Week, approved by the European Commission and held in the framework of the Innovation Tourism Day organized by Finnova.
In the first information day of the accelerator program, an overview of the program was presented, highlighting the benefits and opportunities it offers for your tourism business. This innovative event is part of the actions to achieve the overall objective of the project: to promote innovation, sustainability, and business creation in the tourism sector through a design-driven process.
The day kicked off with the intervention of Adrian Noheda, Director of Innovation at Finnova, with the presentation of the CulturalDeTour Accelerator, giving details about the resources, guidance and networking offered by this program. "Between January and June 2024, the 30 participating SMEs will be able to benefit from four national workshops in the language of each participating country, two transnational workshops for cross-border understanding and collaboration; five hours of one-on-one mentoring on sustainability business modeling, access to industry experts for personalized guidance and advice, thematic courses and webinars from partner organizations and networking opportunities to share best practices," explained Noheda.
The event continued with a Table of Synergies and projects in which intervened Graciela Olivert Cerveró, director Consorci de la Ribera del Àrea de turismo; Estefanía Osorio Acosta, Academic Director of the Degree in Tourism and Double Degree in Tourism-ADE Universidad Politécnica de Valencia; and Marta Templado Isasa, executive director of TURIART, who provided an institutional and academic vision of sustainability and the importance of supporting entrepreneurship in this sector.
To close this block, Natalia Bayona, CEO of the World Tourism Organization, whose synergy is the framework of Awake Tourism Challenge of the UNWTO, of which Finnova is a partner.
Finally, Juanma Revuelta, General Director of the Finnova Foundation, closed the event by highlighting that "both cultural tourism and religious or pilgrimage tourism are the ones showing the most robust recovery among international visitors after COVID-19, followed by business, study and leisure tourism." Likewise, he highlighted the importance that sustainability training would add to this sector "as it not only targets current needs but coincides with the European Year of Skills where people's aspirations and skills must be matched with opportunities in the labor market, especially for the ecological and digital transition and economic recovery."