Hello from Assisi - Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy, 12 March 2016.
The EU-Funded Vocational Training Project, APP TOUR YOU, aims to give managers of small and medium-sized tourism businesses the know-how and skills to develop accessible offers and experiences for their customers by improving their management practices, customer care, information and their facilities.
In Assisi, a group of 16 managers from four countries: Italy, Poland, Slovenia and Spain, met with the project team to immerse themselves in a 5-day course on "Tourism for All" principles and methods. The managers not only learned new skills to help them grow their own businesses. The APP TOUR YOU project aims to make them "peer facilitators" in an online "MOOC" (Massive Online Open Course) where potentially hundreds of other tourism managers will be able to learn about Accessible Tourism for All.
The MOOC, which will be free of charge, will run for a fixed period of two months starting on 15th January 2017. The project team hopes to engage tourism professionals from all over Europe other regions in the "open learning" experience. The peer facilitators will help other MOOC participants to find their way through the course and act as discussion partners on all kinds of issues and experiences.
Sticky note text by a course trainee reads:
"The Accessible Tourism is the way to permit to everybody to discover the beauty of the world and the joy of travelling".
Targetting more sign-ups for Pantou
One of the key aspects of the project is that tourism managers, by joining the MOOC, will learn how to improve the accessibility of their facilities to a point where they can register their businesses with Pantou - the European Accessible Tourism Directory. In this way they will gain visibility for their offer and reach a wider market.
Behind the APP TOUR YOU project is a partnership of experienced accessible tourism practitioners and advocates:
- TANDEM, Italy Coordinator of App Tour You, social cooperative
- ASM, Poland ASM -Market Research and Analysis Centre
- ENAT, Belgium the European Network for Accessible Tourism is a Belgian non-profit association,
- Catalonia Directorate General for Tourism, Spain The Catalan Regional Governement tourism authority
- HOTREC, Belgium representing the hotel, restaurant and café industry at European level.
- INCIPIT, Italy Consulting Social Cooperative,
- PREMIKI, Slovenia Institute and travel agency social entreprise.
Keep in touch with the project and receive information about the upcoming MOOC.
- Subscribe to the APP TOUR YOU e-Newsletter
- Twitter: @apptouryou
- Facebook: APP TOUR YOU
By Ivor Ambrose, Managing Director, ENAT.
APP TOUR YOU (ATY) - Innovative accessible tourism training through self learning and assessment apps and collaborative platforms for tourism sector operators” - an EU-financed project under the Erasmus+ programme, Key Action 2: Strategic Partnerships.
The project will develop an online tourism training "MOOC" and a mobile "App" to increase the competence of business owners and managers. The European Commission has launched several studies and projects in the last few years to increase the awareness and availability of accessible destinations and tourism products across Europe and the tourism sector is waking up to the opportunities for serving this market. This has generated a growing demand for specialised training. ATY aims to actively contribute to the efforts to make the EC investments profitable in terms of increased quality and managerial capacity by SMEs operating in the tourism sector.
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