Gastro-tourism, culinary tourism or food and beverage tourism is the exploration of food/beverage as the purpose of tourism. It is now considered a vital component of the tourism experience. Dining out is common among tourists and "food is believed to rank alongside climate, accommodation, and scenery" in importance to tourists. Food/Beverage Tourism is ‘the act of travelling for a taste of place to get a sense of place’ Erik Wolf, Executive Director World Food Travel Association. Gastro-tourism, a niche that attracts billions in revenue worldwide, involves intentional pursuits of authentic memorable culinary experiences while travelling internationally, regionally or locally. For gastro-tourists, food/beverage is the motivation for travel; the locations merely functions as vehicles for gastronomic experiences (food-related-activities that involve behind-the-scenes observations, cultural/regional illuminations and often hands-on participation, culminating in partaking food or drink.) • 7.2 travellers choose a destination by its food and drink* • 53% of all travellers are ‘culinary’ travellers* • 49% of all travellers are beverage travellers* • 80% of travellers research food and drink while they are visiting a destination* (* source World Food Travel Association) The fact that Food and Beverage helps to underline and strengthen local and regional identity is an important point for tourism development. Tourists are often in search of some kind of regional specificity or 'authenticity. Top Tourism Industry Benefits include sustainable, respectful, and educated visitors. Increased media coverage including social media influencers and food and travel bloggers. Increase in tax revenue allocated to government authorities. Increased community awareness and pride in local culinary cultures. Increased benefits to local economy in terms of tourism spend, local agriculture and employment. The BevTOUR project results will help food and beverage producers, and the support organisations and intermediaries in this sector all over Europe to understand the potential benefits of Food and Beverage Tourism to their own business, and to the wider region. It will help them to understand what is possible in terms of developing their tourism potential through best practice cases from around Europe. The results include; • Project Platform (website/app) • A handbook detailing best practices case studies in Food and Beverage Tourism from around Europe, and tools and templates to develop and promote a gastro-tourism destination. • A Tourists Guidebook of Food/Beverage Tourism projects in each partner country, a minimum of 33 projects covering a range of categories of food and beverage including suggested itineraries, recommended stop off points. The main aims and objectives (impact) of BevTOUR are; • To increase awareness among artisan food and beverage producers of the economic opportunity presented • To provide producers and regional intermediaries with the tools to develop their tourism product and marketing strategy Project partners have the requisite range or skills, experience, expertise and reach to deliver on this important project; • Strode College United Kingdom • Mullingar Employment Action Group Ireland • Inn Training Ltd, United Kingdom • Dramblys Social Creative Lab, Spain • Agency for Territorial Marketing, Slovenia • E-Code, Slovakia • Eurotracks France • Med.O.R.O. scarl Italy • Institute Of Entrepreneurship Development Greece • Sihtasutus Noored Teaduses Ja Ettevotluses Estonia • Comparative Research Network EV Germany • ESE, Ensino Superior Empresarial, LDA (European Business School), Portugal The management and coordination will be based on the Institute of Project Management system and tools that will ensure the correct information processing and will present clearly the decision making responsibilities and tasks by partner. Project management will be closely interlinked with Quality Assurance, Monitoring & Control and Evaluation processes. The milestones of the project are summarized as follows; • Delivery of national reports from all partner jurisdictions, which will be compiled and reviewed with a view to inform the content of the intellectual outputs going forward. These reports will include a minimum 3 best practice case studies from each jurisdiction, minimum 33 in total. • Shortlisting of the case studies and selection of minimum 11 for the BevTOUR Handbook. • Compilation, testing, translations and release of the BevTOUR Guidebook, with minimum 33 BevTOUR destinations, itineraries and maps. • Development of tools, templates and campaign materials for BevTOUR campaigns • Revision and pilot testing of the intellectual outputs • Final revision and translation of intellectual outputs followed by publication and 'official launch' • Official Launch of the Project Web Platform, the BevTOUR Handbook which will include all project outputs, in 10 languages. • A series of Multiplier Events
Our main objectives was to showcase really good operators, to be able to share ideas with others throughout the whole of Europe and to create interest Europewide about the travel opportunities,and destinations that are available on a regional basis with a wide and varied cornucopia of experiences. What works well in one country may not have been considered in another, and this could help open up new revenues of opportunity. We wanted to present to present the project and the guidebook to the rural areas of high resources, nonetheless deeply depopulated and lacking initiatives and participation.We wanted to share the practices with different kind of decision-makers and business of the province with the hope that they would be inspired to adapt some of them Greece, for example is an intense tourist country, with a plethora of gastronomy events. So through the implementation of this project, our main objective was to promote good practices of local food and beverage events, but also to help local producers to be exemplified by similar events across Europe, to raise awareness of the economic opportunities presented, and to give them the appropriate tools for the development of their tourism products and marketing strategy
Many of the organisations have an interest in the hospitality industry. For example, Meag, Dramblys and Inn Training, worked together in a project entitled SMILE, which was working with MicroBrewers across the EU and helping them develop their business and get the product to market. This project wass to celebrate the variety and innovation that abounds in the entreprenurial and creative sector that is hospitality. For Inn Training - "This felt like a natural project for us to be able to contribute a lot to sharing our knowledge and expertise of the trade in the UK. As a training company we were also very interested to learn from the other partners how the hospitality, travel and tourism trade was delivering in their countries." France - We, Eurotracks works with unemployed people and the interest in participating is to professionalize the team in practice to use eco-tourism and Tourism to realize better mobilities for our trainees. To have a structure to work with. Germany - CRN has already participated in a number of projects on tourism, notably with a focus on forms of sustainable tourism. Berlin and the surrounding region of Brandenburg have seen a considerable development of food and beverage tourism in the recent past, with many start-ups entering the field in a highly competitive environment. Discussions with local stakeholders have shown that there is a keen interest in best practices from other European countries how to include tourism in planned or already existing business models of food and beverage producers. You can see that we all had different reasons.