From the 11th of January to the 13th the second General Assembly of the RESETTING consortium will take place in Lisbon, hosted by one of its main partners: ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa.
The three days will be full of presentations, discussions, activities and proposals from the main partners, that will each focus on their field of expertise.
The Assembly will start with the contribution from EURECAT, that will discuss the management of the RESETTING project and its coordination, by giving a thorough presentation concerning the schedule and the deliverables progress, the financial project execution overview and lastly the data management board status.
The first day will continue with the contribution from the Heraklion Development Agency, that will focus on the piloting applications with end users and its monitoring. It will discuss the lessons learned and best practices acquired on the 1st Call, and anticipate the preparation of the 2nd Call and the enlargement of the potential beneficiaries base.
The presentation will be followed by a brainstorming activity concerning the construction of a community / ecosystem of digital-prone European tourism SMEs, that the RESETTING consortium will develop to promote co-creation and innovation activities such as twinning, matchmaking, peer learning, and knowledge sharing.
The discussion will focus on questions as “How to promote community building?” “Who (and how) will drive the twinning and matchmaking actions?” “Who (and how) will drive peer learning and knowledge sharing?”.
The second day of the assembly will kick off with the contribution from Cluster TIC, that will talk about training & capacity building, focusing the presentation on three main points:
- Schedule and deliverables review / progress made and open issues;
- Survey on Digital Transformation in Tourism SMEs – results from the first Open Call;
- Pilot mentoring and training activities in Spain.
After Cluster TIC, the hosting partner ISCTE will take the stage for the rest of the day, and will present four main topics.
The first will concern data analytics for tourism, and will touch schedule and deliverables review / progress made and open issues, digital marketing intelligence, and lastly tourism forecasting.
The second topic presented will concern the sustainable B2B marketplace, touching three main points:
- The development and utilization of a cloud-based B2B Marketplace platform to operationalize partnerships between sustainable SMEs and major travel operators;
- The promotion of B2B matchmaking activities in Spain;
- The promotion of B2B matchmaking activities in Portugal.
This presentation will be followed by a brainstorming activity, focused on how to build this B2B marketplace for Sustainable Tourism Experiences and Products (STEPS).
Given how one of the RESETTING consortium objectives is to develop a B2B marketplace with procurement facilities to foster the inclusion of STEPS in travel packages offered by major tourism stakeholders, the issues touched in the brainstorming activity will focus on how to promote SMEs’ application throughout consortium countries, for example by discussing which combination of tourism sustainability (environmental, social, and destination) indicators for assessing STEPS should be made available, or how to bridge the gap between SMEs offering STEPS and major travel operators (B2B matchmaking activities).
The third topic touched by ISCTE will concern Smart Tourism Toolkits, and will touch again three main points:
- Smart tourism toolkit for crowding monitoring solutions;
- Smart tourism toolkit for AR/VR-based tourism experiences;
- Smart tourism toolkit for UAV-based live flying tour experiences.
The fourth topic will be strongly connected with the previous one, and will concern the European Observatory of STT, touching two main points:
- Ongoing surveys on (i) what is “Smart Tourism” and (ii) STT taxonomy validation;
- Criteria for choosing a platform-as-a-service cloud-based virtual trade show for the European Observatory of STT.
The presentation will be once again be followed by a brainstorming activity, that will concern how to build this European Observatory, and the main questions will concern how to complement ST producers’ classification with human validation, how to articulate this observatory with the last two calls for SMEs, how can it help leverage the tourism business and lastly how to provide some guarantee that the Observatory will survive beyond the end of the RESETTING project.
The third day of the assembly will kick off with the presentation from the San Benedetto del Tronto City Council, that will focus on Communication & Dissemination.
The main points of the presentation will be the following:
- Schedule and deliverables review / progress made and open issues;
- Which communication events are we planning for? How to use Discourse for RESETTING communication and dissemination?
- Are social networks enough or we should also seek direct contact? (e.g. what would be an effective communication strategy to make big travel / mass tourism operators aware and willing to include the offer of STEPS in their tourism package bundles?
The day will continue with the Business Support organizations, with the reports of activities from FEHT, Albanian Trip and AUDAX.
The wrap up session will discuss RESETTING critical success factors and improvement opportunities.
Lastly, the Assembly will end with a collective discussion on critical issues, future work and required improvements.