Economic approach to the tourist routes | IP Forte 28-03-2011

Today we began with a brief introduction of all new teachers who start to join us this week:

Natalie Aldous – Australian teaching in the Netherlands

Inna – Finland, 3^rd time in the project

Karine - Belgium, will teach tomorrow during the social aspect

Katrine (Belgium), Inna (Finland) 

Dandja did a brief recap about what we have done last week to inform the other teachers that just arrived.

Then Ms Aldous started her presentation: Economic approach to the tourist routes

She talked about the following 2 topics at the first part of the presentation

•           International and European tourism markets
•           Europe and sustainability

Ms Natalie Aldous's presentation

Then there was a short workshop before getting into the second part. Each national group thought about what the government could implement to develop sustainable tourism.

workshop of the Dutch team

presentation by Dandja & Ivan

We Dutch team came up with these recommendation

• Promotion on Energy label/ certification on sustainable transport, activity or accommodation.

Implementation plan:

1.       Educate the people on sustainable tourism.

e.g. teach children/ students by providing courses starting from elementary school to high school by giving a sort of diploma of sustainability.

2.       Promote the importance/ benefits via informal way e.g. websites/ social media.

3.       For the government to have a Culture Day with food and cultural information on European countries. The embassy should be in charge of the organization.

e.g. as Euro Food Festival.

4.       Competition on sustainability per sector. The most sustainable European country will win the prize.

• Government regulation on exceeding your energy categorization by giving taxes or using tariffs. This should apply per sector.

Implementation plan:

1.       Each sector has its own energy limit; when a company produces less than that, it will get a sort of tax reduction; yet when it exceeds that limit, it will pay high tax.

2.       Government apply sustainable labels on restaurants, basically restaurants get labels when they use e.g. 10% of local products/organic food. It will become a sort of competition for restaurants to become more sustainable and local supportive

• Decrease bureaucracy (minimizing paper work) and making the changing process easier for companies.

e.g. festivals

The government should become lenient on local festivals so they don´t spend too much time on ´paper´ work.

presentation by Spanish group

presentation by Belgium group

presentation by Lithuania group

presentation by Finland group

Then Ms Aldous continued with her presentation.

-          Consumer Sustainable Responsibility

-          Consumer trends (European survey done in 2010 about the influences that motivates the tourism)

After lunch, we started out workshop as usual. Today’s task was to finish analyzing cultural and ICT aspects and come up with recommendations. After around 3 hour’s work, each group did a short presentation about findings and recommendations so far.

Ms Aldous briefly introduced how the process is going to be on Friday, and concluded the works have to be done by Thursday.

It’s gonna be a toal busy week even more than last week, but we, Dutch team, are going to work hard as always!

App. Dandja & Ivan's fabulous presentation

Now time to do some more analyzing!

Groetjes,

Carla, Chymo, Dandja,  Ivan, Mireille