Few days ago HAEMUS members were attending the ECTN online conference, Post-pandemic recovery of European Tourism through Culture, Heritage and Creativity. The conference held online as a digital event on the 22nd of October 2020 was followed by the Awards Ceremony “Destination of Sustainable Cultural Tourism 2020”, with its theme: “Special Interest Tourism development and promotion based on Cultural Heritage”. The conference was organized in close cooperation with City of Krk and University of Rijeka, ECTN members.
The conference aimed to explore major challenges, risks and opportunities for sustainable and responsible tourism development related to culture and heritage assets. Also, suggestions were made for practical steps for the development and promotion of cultural tourism products. The theme encompasses all forms of culture, including contemporary cultural expressions and all forms of cultural heritage, as well as natural heritage.
Presenters were invited to showcase relevant experience, share their best practices, give detailed examples and provide practical recommendations for preserving, restoring, deploying and promoting culture and heritage values, with innovations for sustainable and responsible tourism development.
For a long time HAEMUS is being active in both fields, heritage and cultural tourism with our interactive web sites, our members which are also professional licensed tourist guides and especially with our published self guided travel books. HAEMUS also manages HAEMUS Travel, our social entrepreneurship through which we organize a number of educational tours and we inspire the domestic community and foreign tourists to take care of cultural heritage. Attending an event like this one is very important for the HAEMUS team as an organization which is dealing on a large scale regarding the resource management, education and the promotion of the heritage in general, and the heritage based cultural tourism as well.
It was expressed that 84% of the economic sector which is closely related to the tourism industry (which is about 60 million jobs in the EU) believes that cultural heritage in the micro-regions and at the state level is of particular importance for tourism in general. Many entities gravitate around this entire economic community that is directly related to cultural tourism. This also includes HAEMUS in the heritage interpretation processes, having in mind that some members of our organization are also members of Interpret Europe, and secondly, through our social entrepreneurship HAEMUS Travel.
Since March 2020 many efforts are being made in the name of the post-pandemic recovery of European tourism through culture, heritage and creativity, so far mainly in the cultural tourism section focusing on local audiences and emphasizing the local attractions, since people are limited to travel shorter and closer to where they live.
