Transversal skills for sustainable rural tourism in lagging areas of Europe

The Skilltour KA2 Erasmus + Strategic Partnership was a collaboration of 7 European organisations highly motivated in exploiting the future SKILLTOUR outputs, with complementary expertise and highly experienced in the field of innovative adult training, entrepreneurship education, design of multimedia, web based educational products and study video production.This partnership comprised of partners from: UK, Romania, Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, Belgium and Cyprus.Rural tourism is one of the major economic pillars of rural regions in Europe, representing a sustainable approach to economic development especially in times of crisis, facilitating new employment and contributing to the conservation of the natural, social and cultural heritage. Rural tourism is particularly significant in remote, less developed regions - as it is the case of the partner regions of the SKILLTOUR proposal - where agricultural activities or industry are restrictive and economy is reliant on tourism. To develop sustainable rural tourism businesses, entrepreneurial and competent human resource is needed. Creativity and entrepreneurial thinking plays an important role in diversifying rural tourism services, sustainable strategies being the motor of local development. To address this need the SKILLTOUR project fostered the development of entrepreneurial and transversal skills of adults with low access to adult training (i.e. adults who run or plan to run micro/family tourism businesses in less developed rural areas of Europe ), in order to be able to deliver innovative, high quality products and services and manage their businesses in a sustainable and responsible manner. To reach this the followings main activities were completed through the project:• Research study on needs for entrepreneurial and transversal skills development of adults who run micro/family rural tourism businesses• Good practice models for sustainable rural tourism businesses • Development of new OERs (tailored curriculum and training materials) for entrepreneurship education to support adult organizations in delivering high quality key competence development trainings for adults disadvantaged• Development of a user friendly online learning space that will guide current and future rural entrepreneurs in their key competences development through a structured learning experience; organized as a multi-device learning area, the online portal will contain an interactive virtual tour of competences (study video) and attractive multimedia materials to support and motivate the autonomous learning of adults learners The core target groups of the project were:• adults who run or plan to run micro/family rural tourism businesses (pensions, farm-stays, restaurants, village inns, camping or guest houses, etc,), • adult education providers with high exploitation potential of the project outputs Skilltour was needed for a number of reasons that are still common across our partner countries and more broadly across the EU, they include the high levels of unemployment particularly amongst people with little or no formal education and those facing significant deprivation and disadvantaged.Our project has been able to provide high quality, innovative training materials, build confidence, explore new teaching methods and develop organisational capacity and resources, We have also demonstrated our project successes through local conferences and other dissemination activities. These activities have informed our wider network of partners and stakeholders who have been able to explore our projects work and sought to develop mechanism to support those affected.