Partner meeting in Strömfors, Finland

The partner consortium travelled to beautiful mill village of Strömfors in the Kotka-Hamina area of Finland in unseasonally cold weather. The meeting celebrated 1.5 years of working together and the halfway project milestone. Work package 1 has been finalised and important decision were made for the remaining 1.5 years of the project.

A major project output will be a handbook to aid SMEs in low-season product design. This is the culmination of the experiences that have been created and the resulting evaluation in the current piloting activities. This, all based on the two surveys conducted at the beginning of the project.

Antti Honkanen, senior researcher at Turku University and Visitory Oy will compile the handbook. He presented the first handbook draft and structure whilst complementing the project on the high-quality reports that have been produced and the excellent development work that has been conducted.

Partners and some of our SMEs will evaluate the proposed handbook for relevance and attractiveness for tourism entrepreneurs. A further two drafts will be conducted in the autumn before final publication in October.

The handbook will be used by DMOs and BSOs when conducting workshops in low season product design in all countries of the BSR. The handbook is designed to be easily used independently by SMEs.

The additional focus of the event was looking at the progress so far and working on the deliverable outputs that will be created during the second project stage. This involved evaluation almost half of the 10 transnational experience pilots that have been conducted so far, finalising the plan for concept piloting for the autmn and designing the outputs of work package 3.

In the evening, the group could test part of the products of two experiences developed in the project and the cold weather reinforcing some of the challenges of operating in the low season.

The evening circular kayak tour on the river through an awakening landscape of gentle bird song and beaver dams and wood felling was a welcome relaxing break after an intensive day, for some starting as early as 3am.

Parts of a second product was piloted which featured sauna in an Aivar Aalto studio design riverside sauna with locally produced dinner afterwards.

The pride in the services provided by our project SMEs give value to the support work provided by the project activities.

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