REDIRECT

From reducing impact to creating positive value

Tourism is important to communities across the Baltic Sea Region, but it can also place pressure on sensitive destinations, natural resources and ecosystems. Increased consumption, waste and pollution, as well as concentrated tourism activity, can affect both the environment and the places where people live.

Reducing these negative impacts is important – but regenerative tourism asks how tourism can go further and actively contribute to the places people visit.

REDIRECT explores this shift from reducing harm to creating positive value. The project understands regenerative tourism as an approach that can strengthen destinations ecologically, socially, culturally and economically, while creating stronger connections between visitors, local communities, businesses and the places they share.

Across the Baltic Sea Region, destinations face a shared challenge: how can these principles be turned into approaches that can be understood, adapted and applied in practice by tourism organisations, businesses, public authorities and visitors?

Turning regenerative tourism into practical tools

To address this challenge, nine partners from seven countries are jointly developing and testing the REDIRECT Toolkit for Regenerative Tourism.

The Toolkit brings regenerative tourism from concept towards practical application. Its complementary tools address different parts of the tourism system and support different target groups in planning, assessing and taking regenerative action.

How the REDIRECT Toolkit works

The Toolkit brings together five complementary components, which are currently being refined and tested:

• The Regenerative Tourist Savoir Vivre Manual focuses on visitor behaviour and explores how visitors can become active contributors to the destinations they visit.
• The Regenerative Destination Assessment helps destinations establish a shared understanding of their current situation, strengths, challenges and opportunities for regeneration.
• Step-by-Step Regenerative Tourism Planning Guide provides a structured process for planning and developing regenerative tourism.
• Regenerative Tourism Impact Calculator helps assess both the negative impacts and positive contributions of tourism.
• Regenerative Tour Design Checklists & Monitoring Templates support the integration, monitoring and continuous improvement of regenerative tourism practices.

Together, the tools support different stages of a continuous regenerative journey – from understanding a destination and planning regenerative action to visitor behaviour, impact assessment, monitoring and continuous improvement.

Testing the tools in practice

As part of the development process, REDIRECT is now testing and refining the tools across the partner regions with relevant tourism stakeholders. The testing examines their usability, relevance and practical application in different destinations and organisational contexts.

This is an important part of the development process. The people who are expected to use or benefit from the tools – including tourism organisations, businesses, public authorities and visitors – provide feedback that helps the partnership understand what works, what needs clarification and where local adaptation is necessary.

Initial findings show both the potential of the Toolkit and the importance of making regenerative tourism practical and accessible. Feedback across the different components points to the need for clear language, practical guidance, a clear distinction between target groups and sufficient flexibility to adapt the tools to different local contexts.

Testing has also highlighted the importance of connecting guidance and assessment with concrete opportunities for regenerative action.

Learning across the Baltic Sea Region

The transnational dimension is central to REDIRECT. The partner regions represent different destination types, governance structures and stakeholder environments.

Testing the Toolkit across these different contexts helps identify both common principles and areas where local adaptation is needed. Experiences from the pilot regions also show that putting regenerative tourism into practice is closely connected to local resources, relationships, challenges and existing stakeholder structures.

The knowledge generated through testing will be used to further refine the REDIRECT Toolkit before the project moves into wider dissemination and application.

Looking ahead

REDIRECT aims to make regenerative tourism easier to understand and apply in practice.

The long-term ambition is to strengthen the capacity of destinations and tourism actors to integrate regenerative principles into tourism planning and practice, while creating meaningful opportunities for visitors to contribute positively to the places they visit.

By developing, testing and refining the Toolkit across the Baltic Sea Region, REDIRECT seeks to provide practical approaches that can support tourism in creating positive ecological, social, cultural and economic value for destinations and their communities.