Smart Travelling around Europe: a Youth Guide for Sustainable Tourism Erasmus Project

Project Title

Smart Travelling around Europe: a Youth Guide for Sustainable Tourism

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Creativity and culture; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

The topic is called “Smart Travelling around Europe: a Youth Guide for Sustainable Tourism”.
The coordinating school is Theodor-Frank-Realschule Teningen, Germany. Other partners are Lahden yhteiskoulun säätiö in Lahti, Finland, the Gymnasium of Eretria in Eretria, Greece, Garðaskóli in Garðabær, Iceland, Istituto Professionale Statale per i Servizi Socio Sanitari De Lilla Bari in Bari, Italy and the Institut Màrius Torres in Lleida, Catalonia/Spain.
We are all Secondary schools preparing our pupils for a responsible and sustainable life in a quickly changing world, facing major problems in terms of environmental damage, climate change as well as social and economic differences. The main aim of our project is to make students aware of the different ways of how each country is trying to cope with these challenges locally and help them learn from each other and transfer ideas from one to the other country in order to educate them to reasonable persons with a thourough understanding of the term “Think global – act local” and a strong will to create a better future for everyone.
Tourism is a growing business in all of these countries and regions, though some rely more on tourism in their economy than others, but all of our partner regions attract tourists one way or another. In this project we want to combine the topic of tourism with another topic that seems to be in every other headline in the media these days: sustainability (defined in different ways such as Economy, Health, (Renewable) Energies, Geology, History or Culture …)
How can tourism and sustainability be combined then in an Erasmus+ project? We believe that by introducing an innovation called “a sustainable travel guide” we can promote sustainable growth in tourism. This sustainable travel guide would help tourists to travel with less impact on nature, global warming and therefore the welfare of the people living in tourist areas across Europe – especially in the home regions of our pupils themselves. The other aspect in the project is to study tourism and its importance in each of the partner school regions: the idea is that the students involved in the project would learn to understand better the meaning of tourism in their home region’s economy, employment and welfare.
The pupils will research about typical tourist attractions in their region, find out in what way they are working sustainably (in any of the above mentioned ways) and describe these best practices against the background of the local problems/challenges they are trying to solve/cope with. For each attraction there will be one section/subpage in the travel guide with photos, texts, facts and figures as well as audio files, that the students have to create in English (written and also spoken). As the developed website will be maintained still after the end of the project, this travel guide will be available on the internet for coming generations and can easily be continued by interested students and teachers in the future who are willing to immers themselves in the topic.
Flyers and posters with a QR code, that leads directly to the website, will be distributed in local tourist information centres and tourist boards in each country as well as given to local stakeholders in the business.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 164364 Eur

Project Coordinator

Theodor-Frank-Realschule Teningen & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Institut Màrius Torres
• GYMNASIUM OF ERETRIA
• Istituto Professionale Statale per i Servizi Socio Sanitari De Lilla Bari
• Garðaskóli
• Lahden yhteiskoulun säätiö