Croatia’s Institute for Tourism and international NGO the Travel Foundation have formed a partnership that will support the recovery and longer term development of tourism in Southeast Europe as travel restrictions begin to ease. The partnership aim is to maximise the value that tourism brings to destination communities while minimising its impact on the environment and natural resources.

By combining and scaling their expertise, they will offer a programme of support for governments and businesses operating in Croatia and other countries in the region such as Albania, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. The partnership will support tourism recovery planning based on science-based research on tourism’s positive and negative impacts, and will build the capacity of destination management organisations, local development organisations and small businesses to recover with a smart and sustainable  response to the COVID-19 crisis. The organisations will implement programmes that may include:

• Introducing or enhancing globally recognised sustainability standards
• Developing new key performance indicators to measure success
• Building smarter data management systems for evidence-based decision-making
• Participatory planning, involving a broad cross section of destination stakeholders, to develop a shared public-private-community agenda for developing and managing the visitor economy.