Project title: Rural tourism along Via Dinarica
Donor: EU – Regional Cooperation CouncilCost of the project: 54.725,00 EUR
Amount contributed by donor: 49.225,00 EUR
Implementation period: October 2019 – November 2020.
The specific objective of this action is Via Dinarica regional adventure and its cultural corridor, while specific objective is to improve rural tourism offer and visibility along Via Dinarica corridor. Through activities designed in this project, at least 50 rural tourism households will be assisted in improving quality of their offer through increasing standards, and through improvements in interior decorations of these households, and through improved visibility of these service providers. This will contribute to improved services on Via Dinarica routes, and will provide an opportunity for travellers to get to know the local culture best preserved in rural communities. On the other side, local population will get an opportunity to participate in tourism activities and generate incomes from those activities, which is of great importance for economically marginalised and challenged rural population in Montenegro.
The activities in this project are gathered around two results:
Result 1: Quality of rural tourism offer improved. The activities that will contribute to this achievement of this result are related to working with 50 households providing rural tourism services in order to get to know the conditions of their service and then designing capacity building activities to improve the standards and make the quality of the offer more uniform between different households. EuroGites standards will be applied, and EuroGites is a network of EU rural tourism associations working together to improve rural tourism offer, that Montenegro association has just joined. Moreover, traditional handicrafts and handmade decorations will be used to improve the interior design in rural households, that are often not well decorated and do not reflect local traditions.
Result 2: Visibility of rural tourism offer increased. Very often rural households offering tourism services are unaware of all the ways available to them to increase the visibility of their services. Very often they lack proper signage, they have not marked their estates on online maps, they do not have any promotional materials. To improve this, the appropriate signs will be set up to show to visitors where they can get services of local food, typical products, accommodation or camping. Web portal of the association will be updated with new information, each family will be presented with adequate photos and information such as description of services, vicinity of outdoor offer, natural attractions etc. All this material will also be used to develop promotional fliers which will be placed at tourist info points in order to provide proper information to guests on where they can get what services.
