The project had 3 measurable objectives: 1) We aimed to educate and certify 10 European VET professionals, including marketers, tourism practitioners and educators, in Conscious Marketing for Regenerative Tourism. The programme used a hybrid VET model combining an immersive in-person training week with online follow-up sessions, designed to be accessible for working adults. 2) We aimed to strengthen connections between participants and rural regenerative tourism communities in Tuscany, ensuring that learning was experiential rather than abstract and that it could lead to professional collaborations beyond the grant period. 3) We aimed to produce a high-quality, freely available open educational resource, the Marketers for Regenerative Tourism Toolkit, and disseminate it to at least 10,000 practitioners, VET providers and SMEs across Europe through Erasmus+ platforms, partner networks and professional channels. Across all objectives, the project was guided by a values-aligned commitment: it would not only teach marketers about Regenerative Tourism in theory, but would also model these practices through delivery in a real regenerative setting, with local community members and practical consequences for marketing decisions.
Tourism marketing often directs visitors and investment toward destinations that are already saturated, contributing to overtourism in cities while rural areas continue to face depopulation and economic exclusion. This challenge is visible in both partner countries: Italy’s National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) and Estonia’s European Semester Country Report both recognise the social and economic vulnerabilities affecting rural regions. At the same time, marketers, tourism practitioners, freelancers, SME professionals and educators often have limited access to practical VET opportunities showing how marketing can support regenerative, community-based tourism. We applied for this project to address this gap on a small scale. The project responded to three main needs: - the lack of accessible, practice-based VET combining Conscious Marketing and Regenerative Tourism principles - the lack of grounded and transferable open educational resources for VET trainers, SMEs and tourism professionals across Europe - the limited cross-border peer infrastructure connecting marketing and tourism professionals committed to regenerative practice in rural contexts