Inspiring lectures, stimulating discussions, valuable expert knowledge and a lot of space and time for the exchange of experiences were on the agenda.
On Friday, 16 November 2018, the annual TourCert Forum took place in the Haus am Dom in Frankfurt am Main. This was the sixth time that experts in sustainable tourism met to exchange ideas. A good combination of members of the TourCert community, partners and of course the TourCert team came together to exchange point of views, to discuss current topics, to establish contacts and to learn about news from TourCert.
The moderator and author Heike Leitschuh welcomed the guests and accompanied them through the day. After a short introduction, she handed over to TourCert managing partner Marco Giraldo, who presented current topics: Figures about the community, next exhibitions & events, progress in marketing & communication and above all current and upcoming projects in Latin America, the Danube region but also in Uganda, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
As first speaker, we welcomed the climate researcher Stefan Gössling, who critically dealt with the question “Customer loyalty through climate change” and the role of eco-labels in connection with climate protection. The question “Why don’t we have any eco-labels in all travel catalogues?” was then discussed in so-called mumble groups.
The main part of the day was dedicated to the “Open Space” format. With this method, everyone can contribute through their own content and questions, working groups are formed and solutions are worked out. Our guests were mainly interested in the topics of communication, service providers and overtourism. The respective groups quickly got together and spread out around the house to exchange ideas and find solutions together.
In the second expert presentation, Anne Kipple from WRE Training offered practical tips for tourism professionals on “Changing roles as a sustainability manager”. What needs to be considered? What makes the change easier? How do I deal with it? Everybody gets into such situations of changing roles every day, whether at home or at work. Also here, there was the opportunity to reflect in small groups and then discuss the key question “How can the task of sustainability managers be made easier in the company?”.
A summary of wishes and suggestions for future meetings followed at the end. We will gladly record these in order to constantly improve our TourCert Forum. We look forward to more stimulating days like this! You can find more impressions of the event here.
Tags
Exchange, Stefan Gössling, WRE
