StandOut - Blue growth in coastal regions through culture and tourist attraction development

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Tourism attractions are important growth drivers for tourism development in coastal regions. They serve as complementary tourism offers to the maritime tourism in coastal areas, being bad weather alternatives, landmarks+off-season attractions that add value to the blue growth of coastal regions. Despite this role, the necessity to develop the quality of these attractions, to create new innovations+increase its attractiveness is still not well recognized in the regions that benefit from these attractions. There is a need for innovation clusters bringing tourism attractions+businesses together to jointly attract international markets. Tourism attractions permanently lack (public) financial support. Therefore tourism attractions, which often originate from cultural backgrounds, are forced to commercialize their core operation further+focus more than ever on experience creation,visitor’s demands+on attracting new target groups. At the same time more competitors of tourism attractions have emerged while visitor numbers are stagnating or even decreasing, which puts their economic existence at risk. Attraction operators need to permanently invest in new experiences+innovations to sustain their visitor numbers. To increase the number of guests from international markets, tourism destinations have a greater chance to get attention by utilizing the common cultural heritage to profile tourism attractions+offers based on typical themes of South Baltic coastal regions. However, tourism attraction operators often lack professionalization+knowledge in: target groups demands+trends, how to set up strategies for innovation, how to cooperate+produce new packages, fundraising, profiling+marketing. In order to develop+promote new products there is a need to better cooperate with tourism businesses (which are dominated by SMEs) that often lack personnel+financial resources as well as competences to do market research, product development+strategic marketing themselves.

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