As the transition towards sustainable practices and circular economy is becoming ever more present in various fields of our everyday lives, tourism is not lagging much behind either. Many European projects and respective organisations are enhancing this transition and supporting stakeholders along the tourism value chain to take up existing practices and develop new innovative ones. TOURISME, targeting a specific group of stakeholders is about to open its doors to 62 SMEs from Cyprus, Italy, France and Spain and support them in adapting their business models with a variety of sustainability principles.

A great starting point for this would be the recently conducted research on the state of the art and the existing good practices and their advantages in making tourism more sustainable, done by Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. This research resulted in a comprehensive compendium of good practices across Europe and beyond, with 100 selected practices that the sustainability experts working on the projects considered and verified as exemplary. This compendium will soon be made available for the project’s audience. Another ACR+ member, l’Institut Paris Region is now developing support schemes for future beneficiaries of the project, with new innovative practices and procedures as well as translating existing practices into useful guidelines for their replication. Once the schemes are confirmed, a major milestone of the project would take place as a call for SMEs would be launched in order to select and take on board the 6 aforementioned SMEs. This selection of SMEs will reflect several important stakeholder groups in the field of tourism such as hotels and similar accommodations, holiday and short-stay accommodations, travel agency activities and other reservation services and related activities. The call for SMEs is expected for autumn this year.