The last day of August marked the ending of the Erasmus+ project Innoguide 2.0 for education of tour guides – but team members agreed to keep it going.
We have already reported about the Innoguide 2.0 project on a few occasions. The full name of the project is ‘Innoguide 2.0 – Guiding as a trigger for a more sustainable, diverse and exciting Europe! Stimulating innovation and entrepreneurship in the field of guiding.’ This project was a follow-up of a previous Leonardo Lifelong Learning project Innoguide, concluded in 2013. Seven partners from five European countries (Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland and Netherlands), coordinated by the Belgian tourist board VisitFlanders, started working together in 2014 to develop useful tools and help increase an entrepreneurial mind-set among tour guides and guiding organisations.
As a result, a new website was published at www.innoguidetourism.eu where you can find inspirational videos and blog posts. What’s more important, anyone can register for the free e-learning platform and explore learning and teaching materials developed by experts in guide training. There are three major topics covered: sustainability, interculturality and experiential guiding. Some partner institutions have organised training for guides and guide trainers in different European countries over the last two years.
Service design principles were used to create a useful toolkit that can help improve tours and guides’ service through the understanding of customers’ experiences. They’re easy to use and can also be found on the website. Using service design methodology, through workshops and surveys in various European countries, several types of tour guide profiles, the so-called ‘personas’, were identified for easier improvement of guiding skills.
In all the participating countries, the project received a significant attention and coverage. Why don’t you check out for yourself what has been done, and use the Innoguide tools to learn new skills or share them with your students?
The timeframe of the European project has just ended, but the people who developed it, as well as many others involved in other ways, are eager to keep it going. The final road show of the project was recently held in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. During an interesting day full of presentations and workshops, a promise was made that Innoguide would continue through work and educational activities of everyone who has participated in the project.
Find more information about Innoguide 2.0 at www.innoguidetourism.eu.
Iva Silla creates interpretive walking tours of her hometown Zagreb and was leading the Croatian Innoguide team. Contact her at iva@secret-zagreb.com.
To cite this article:
Silla, I. (2016) ‘Innoguide continues’. In Interpret Europe Newsletter 3-2016, 16
Available online:
https://www.interpret-europe.net/fileadmin/Documents/publications/Newsletters/ie-newsletter_2016-3_autumn.pdf
