BalticMuseums: Love IT! - New brand of gamified tourist products for sustainable development of natural and cultural heritage tourist destinations

Project description

The project involves nine project partners, from Sweden (1), Denmark (1), Germany (2), from Poland (4) and form Lithuania (1) as well as ten associated partners. With this composition covering all five programme countries. The University of Szczecin (PL) has role of a lead partner. Partnership consists of museums, tourist attractions, universities and NGOs. The core partners are supported by eight associated partners, such as as tourism organisation, museums, NGOs operating in tourism and IT sectors.
The project originates from the cooperation and partnership form the projects implemented within perspective 2007-2013, Baltic Museums 2.0 and Baltic Museums Plus. The project Baltic Museums LOVE IT is focused on coastal attractions (sea museums, natural museums and science centres) to turn them into sustainable tourism destinations. The project promises to deliver new IT-enabled tourism products for natural and cultural heritage tourist destinations in the area to increase their potential in the cases of: bad weather, low season, peaks in high season (crowds) and for tourists with language barriers.
The project’s activities are planned in 5 work packages. WP 3 delivers a capacity programme that would enable the staff of the participating attractions to be more aware of the visitors’ needs and to adopt a user experience approach. It will be supported by a handbook on how to apply various IT-driven users experience models in exhibitions, and carried out through 9 training sessions (video-documented). WP4 features the user-centric process to designing 6 multilingual BYOD-guided tours. On that path, concepts will be defined for the common (for mutual destinations) gamification service and its components, while 4 hackathon events (with visitors, IT enthusiasts and software developers). WP5 encourages the end users to test and evaluate the prototype products, with additional hackathon event conducted. This stage will also welcome managers of tourist destinations outside the project partnership to adopt the solutions in their sites through so called welcome packs.
The main target groups involved in the project activities are:

• Managers and staff of tourism attractions (non-partners) in the South Baltic Region and beyond,
• Tourism institutions and their organisations,
• Tourism agencies,
• General pubic (potential visitors).