New green travel apps unveiled
ECOTRANS revealed both massive European networks and new green developments.
A packed and excited room awaited those scheduled to attend the ECOTRANS workshop at ITB, being part of the European Ecolnet project. They were not disappointed.
New developments, currently at beta level included:
- Fouli Papageorgiou of Prisma presented the European Ecotourism Network initiative which will bring together stakeholders across Europe to use the GSTC recognized European Ecotourism Labeling Standard for exchange and capacity building
- Volker Schmidt of TravelMotion presented his Green Destination Viewer – currently in beta mode at Mostviertel (Austria) – the application provides marketing and showcasing for green destinations.
- Roxane Kaempf and a brace of friends outlined their plans to make European tourism more sustainable with their new GreenHopping app www.greenhopping.eu The application is a green trip planning tool which will be launched in beta mode by the end of April.
- Gordon Sillence unveiled the new global Eye on Earth network initiative which is supported by European Environment Agency and member states and aims to harness citizen participation, crowd sourcing and citizen science to establish user communities reporting on environmental issues. using the DestiNet Atlas as global sustainable tourism layer
- Otto Fichtl described Austria’s new Green Travel Mapping scheme already with certified businesses, travel offers, mobility providers, destinations and associations and aiming to integrating all relevant and certified sustainable Austrian tourism offers into one map,.
- Valere Tjolle brought the meeting up-to-date with the progress of the VISTA awards – now to go global and with the support of it’s own task-force network including Alpine Pearls, EDEN destinations and Quality Coast.
Earlier there had been presentations from leaders of sustainable tourism networks including: The Global Sustainable Tourism Council (Kelly Bricker), EDEN – about 80 awarded community tourism destinations in Europe (Antonio Pezzano), Alpine Pearls – the multi-award-winning soft mobility network of Alpine villages (Karmen Mentil), Quality Coast, – the network of coastal destinations, and NECSTouR network of European regions (Albert Salman), Living Lakes – over 120 members worldwide (Marion Hammerl), European Charter Parks (Paulo Castro), Pan Parks,- the European wild spaces network (Zoltan Kun); Landscapes of the Year (Christian Baumgartner), Danube Region (Karl Reiner), Ecotourism Destinations in Romania (Andrei Blumer), TIES Europe (Ferdinand Weps), EARTH (José Maria de Juan). Through ECOTRANS and the DestiNet knowledge networking platform for sustainable & responsible tourism they are all connected to each other (Herbert Hamele).
In particular the MOSAIC project in Olympos, Turkey to showcase good practices and to develop an action plan for 2020 (Erdmute Prokosch-Sander). The workshop presentations are published by ECOTRANS here
Valere Tjolle
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