Published on 28 Aug 2023
The International Conference on Cultural Tourism Advances took place in Brussels in June 2023 and saw the participation of six EU-funded Horizon 2020 projects.
TExTOUR is a Horizon 2020 project with the ambition to rethink sustainable cultural tourism in Europe and beyond.
The International Conference on Cultural Tourism Advances is the place where the future of sustainable cultural tourism in Europe is discussed. Together with TExTOUR, five other EU-funded projects: SmarTCulTour, IMPACTOUR, SPOT, INCULTUM, and BeCulTOUR. All these projects address the issue of cultural tourism strategies and remote areas development from different angles.
Cultural heritage is a strategic resource for the economy of many European territories. It is esteemed that approximately 40% of all European tourists make a destination choice based on the cultural offerings.
This is why cultural heritage plays a pivotal role in creating and enhancing social capital and achieving the goals of smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth. However, the economic benefits of tourism are not equally distributed across the European territory, creating issues of both over-and underexploitation.
Remote areas, in particular, are often left behind. One of the main goals of the TExTOUR project is to create a business development model to improve remote areas that is flexible enough to be applied to different territories all across Europe. TExTOUR brought the experience of its eight pilots at the conference, sharing it with the other participants.
The goal of the conference was to further understand the sustainable development potential of cultural tourism by focusing on successful policy interventions, new cultural tourism trends, advances in visitor management systems, and new business and/or governance models.
“Meeting the six projects funded by H2020 was a great opportunity to leverage knowledge, get to know each other better, and elaborate on future possibilities. The keynotes and papers presented by the different academic experts were of the most interest. Looking forward to more common events like this in the future.” Says Lucia Delenikas, Project Manager of the EU project TExTOUR.
