After several meetings and a few months of work, it could be said that we’ve finally laid the groundwork for the first result of the project. As a reminder, this first result is a self-assessment tool for tourism SMEs to assess the level of accessibility of their businesses and the services they offer.
We are currently developing this tool which will help us to achieve one of our main objectives: we aim to help outdoor tourism SMEs to identify opportunities for improving their role in the tourism value chain.
So far, we have elaborated a few documents with this purpose. First of all, we have defined the areas and elements that we will study and analyze with this self-assessment tool. They are based on the “Handbook on Tourism Accessible to All: Principles, tools and good practices” (Manual sobre turismo Accesible para Todos: Principios, herramientas y buenas prácticas) of Fundación ONCE and the European Network for Accessible Tourism (ENAT).
We have also defined the methodology to establish levels of accessibility, so that we already have a unique criterion to be able to evaluate, in the most objective way possible, the tourist resources through the tool that we will develop. As it is said, we have adapted the study of elements of th”Handbook on Tourism Accessible to All: Principles, tools and good practices” and use them as the reference for the self-assessment level of Accessibility of the SMEs.
As a means to provide an overall assessment of accessibility, we have established to evaluate with a range from 0 to 10 each element of study and their sub-elements of it, considering the key themes linked to each element of study. Therefore, it is provided an average level of accessibility for each element and sub-element of study, providing them with the knowledge the SMEs needed to evaluate which areas they should consider to improve. In addition, they know an overall level of accessibility (from 0 to 10 points) which indicates their overall status regarding the accessibility of their outdoor tourism and adventure activities.
And last but not least, we are currently working on the questionnaire that we will include in the self-assessment tool.
These documents have been tested through a brainstorming meeting with tourist industry stakeholders. Each partner of the project has organizated one meeting at their country, face-to-face but also online.
As soon as we finish developing the tool, we will let you know. So stay tunned!