Towards participatory cultural tourism development: insights from practice

Participatory cultural tourism development with a specific focus on social inclusion, innovation, and smart technologies is pivotal to achieve sustainable forms of tourism at local level. This paper aims to present the methodological approach behind the tools, concepts, and procedures that have been used to develop a participatory co-designing process in eight remote pilot areas for the EU-funded TExTOUR project. To this end, the participatory planning process will be described in all the phases that pilots had to undertake, specifically 1) co-mapping of the local heritage resources and human capital and advancing a vision for the area shared by the local communities and stakeholders involved in the process, 2) creation of a set of tourism actions based on the highlighted resources and their integration with relevant ICT services, 3) planning the implementation of the actions using a tool specifically created for this methodology, the TExTOUR business model canvas, and finally, 4) defining a set of targets, and correlated relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicator), to measure the impacts of the actions. The methodology resulting from this process will contribute to fill current gaps and shortcomings in the participatory practices and approaches to sustainable, smart, inclusive, and innovative CT development.