The People Powered Tourism project – empowerment of local communities through co-designing experience-based transformative travel to enhance visitor economy, #DRP0301146, is co-financed by the European Union through the Interreg Danube Regional Programme and brings together 14 partners from 10 countries in the Danube Region, along with 12 associated thematic partners.
Partners from across the Danube Region—including public institutions, tourism organisations, civil society groups, and development agencies—will collaborate to rethink tourism by engaging local communities in the co-creation of visitor experiences that are sustainable, inclusive, and transformative.
The project aims to find answers to the challenges of modern tourism from a visitor economy perspective by effectively involving local communities. New tourism focuses on human relationships, encounters, personalized experiences and individual needs, which enrich the opportunities offered by tourist destinations. According to the new approach, it is worth focusing not on the products and attractions available in the destinations, but on the socio-economic impacts, creating the opportunity for quality visitor experiences. Targeted visitor experiences can thus bring real social and economic changes in the destination community.
Official website of the project: https://interreg-danube.eu/projects/people-powered-tourism
Challenges: the project seeks answers to global problems such as:
- Sustainability: balancing the environmental, economic and social impacts of tourism.
- Overtourism: addressing excessive visitor numbers to the most popular historical sites and strengthening lesser-known tourist destinations.
- Involving local communities: residents of many rural and economically less developed areas do not recognize the potential of their cultural and natural assets, and do not have sufficient resources to develop sustainable tourism.
- Ecotourism opportunities: developing the increasingly popular ecotourism, with particular attention to exploiting the potential of nature-based tourism.
Expected results:
- PPT toolkit: a toolkit that helps local communities plan tourism services, highlighting their social and economic benefits.
- PPT Handbook: a handbook supporting sustainable tourism with a special emphasis on nature-based solutions.
- Danube Visitor Economy Platform: an online platform where tourism service providers and decision-makers can find good practices and innovative solutions.
Visitor Economy Roadmap: ten transnational, jointly developed development plans that promote the transformation of local tourism along the principles of the visitor economy.
