Mediterranean Tourism Network
The project MedTourNet aims at promoting the notion of sustainable tourism development of insular and coastal areas through: a) The development of new tourism products (eg. conference, educational, religious, cultural tourism, agrotourism); b) Reduction of the seasonality phenomenon thanks to the provision of new tourism products; c) The promotion of local traditional products; d) The use of new methods and tools for the promotion of traditional products and tourism products to the European and global market. Tourism industry in the regions involved is one of the most important growing economic sectors, and is exhibiting similar weaknesses but at the same time similar opportunities for future development. The partnership has active involvement in local and regional development and has identified common characteristics critical in the tourism sustainable development as follows: • Tourism in these areas has a seasonal demand pattern with impact to quality of services. National and private investment is needed in order to have significant magnitude of operation, retain experienced personnel, provide high quality service and amortize repair and upgrade capital expenditures over larger periods of time. However Tourism business is mostly small SMEs, unable to carry this long investment. • Tourism is not focused on niche markets that are profitable like conference, educational, therapeutic, sports and other thematic tourist areas. • There is no Tourism Local Resources Exploitation Plan that will take advantage of existing infrastructure and tourism resources (sightseeing, museums, theatres, festivals etc). In tourist areas there is no central organized tourism plan that can offer solutions and facilities (eg a daily excursion schedule for family entertainment, or one day visitors) that can be included in ‘tourism packages’. • Tourist enterprises are not centrally directed or controlled and thus planning of activities and synergies are left to private entrepreneurship with know-how spill over and synergies to be minimal. At the same time, the size of tourist enterprises is very small SMEs and the lack of networking, use of IT and Telecom technology, as well as lack of proper language and tourist services training makes the situation even more difficult. Med Tour Net objective is to support sustainable tourism development through the exploitation of existing tourism resources and the expansion of the tourism market which is a) tourism period and b) target tourism segment. During the MedTourNet project the partnership will take the necessary actions to describe the existing situation, infrastructure, tourism resources and existing services, and to define new tourism products that can be developed in the area according to existing resources