Destination resilience - quality infrastructures for resilient tourism

Project objectives

1. Increasing the resilience of tourism destinations to risks and crises and strengthening sustainable destination development

2. Supporting the reopening of markets after the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic in the three target destinations

3. Application of the developed concepts and criteria by tourism industry stakeholders in additional destinations

4. Empowering stakeholders to integrate climate mitigation and sustainability into their crisis management Strengthening awareness of the importance of resilience in the tourism sector by involving different levels of politics, science and the tourism industry Integrating climate preparedness and sustainability into their crisis management

5. Raising awareness of the importance of resilience in the tourism sector by involving different levels of politics, science and the tourism industry

Tourism industry must be better prepared for future crises

Tourism is an important economic factor in many developing and emerging countries, including the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka and Namibia. The tourism industry is therefore an important instrument for sustainable local development. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that the global tourism industry has had to face considerable restrictions and losses and is still facing the challenge of reinventing itself and preparing better for future crises.

The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development's (BMZ) coronavirus aid package for tourism aimed to preserve tourism structures and enable local stakeholders to offer tourism products and services again.

In the spirit of "Build back better", the aim was to make the national tourism industry sustainable and achieve improved resilience. This also includes ensuring that entrepreneurs are able to make risk-informed business decisions and that the environmental and social aspects of tourism are improved. The measures are closely tailored to the needs of local people. The entire program is aimed at more than 20 countries that have been particularly hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. These include the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka and Namibia.

Raising awareness of risks, sustainability and resilience

The project "Destination Resilience - Quality Infrastructures for Resilient Tourism" was implemented by Futouris e.V. in cooperation with the German Committee for Disaster Reduction (DKKV) with the support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The project focuses on two aspects: Firstly, the development of a conceptual and methodological framework for assessing resilience and identifying ways to increase the long-term resilience of tourism destinations; secondly, the implementation of workshops and training for local tourism stakeholders to raise awareness of risks, sustainability and resilience and to support resilience-enhancing activities.

Project activities

The following activities were implemented:

• Development of a holistic concept for the resilience of tourism destinations and five methodological steps to identify resilience-promoting strategies in the form of a Destination Resilience Analysis Guideline

• Application of the methodology and implementation of workshops and face-to-face training in the project destinations

• Creation and design of specific resilience guidelines for destinations in the project countries Dominican Republic, Namibia and Sri Lanka Namibia and Sri Lanka

• Creation of supplementary materials in the form of destination-specific flyers and brochures in German, English and Spanish

• Review of options for certifying destinations with regard to their resilience by preparing an expert report and organizing a specialist workshop with global certification organizations

• Dissemination of information to policymakers, Academia and industry representatives at various events

• Digital preparation of the project content in a digital toolkit https://destination-resilience.futouris.org

All developed materials for download

In order to better counter the increasingly frequent crisis events in tourism destinations in the future and to enable the transferability of our project results to other destinations, various communication materials were developed as part of the project:

1. Destination Resilience Analysis Guidance with detailed, conceptual background information on resilience and sustainability as well as a detailed description of our approach including good practice examples from other destinations. good-practice examples from the project destinations.

2. A short version of the guideline with practical approaches.

3. Approach and concrete results and measures from our project destinations in the Destinations Manuals and the shorter Destination Flyers.