Our experience of managing Barcelona Creative Tourism has indicated that a growing range of travellers are interested in creative activities.
The unifying factor among these creative tourists is the importance given to the creative and artistic activity they undertake in the destination.
Often they are passionate about a specific form of creativity that they are also eager to explore in new destinations. For this reason we thought that it would be useful to offer these creative tourists a range of different destinations that can offer a variety of creative experiences.
We therefore founded the Creative Tourism Network (www.creativetourismnetwork.org) in 2010 with partners from Paris and Rome with support from the European Commission through the Culture Programme.
The network aims to give more visibility to destinations – be they villages or major cities – that have the potential to welcome creative tourists.
This initiative started with the organization of the International Conference on Creative Tourism, held in December 2010 in Barcelona (at the emblematic Gaudi building ‘La Pedrera’).
This event attracted experts and entrepreneurs from 26 countries, all already involved in or eager to start developing creative tourism. This highlighted the very rapidly growing interest in this sustainable tourist trend, as well as the rich potential for cooperation between the academic and commercial sectors.
The active participation that characterized the conference was subsequently translated into an active international network.
Our objective is to offer the members the possibility to develop their own initiatives related to creative tourism, while benefiting from the ‘capital’ accumulated by the network in term of databases, international recognition, etc.
In addition to this, the network provides an observatory for the creative tourism sector and helps to formulate best practices, as well as generating synergies within the flows of creative tourism.
Our challenge for the future is to continue developing the network alongside the programmes of individual members, whilst maintaining the authenticity of creative tourism and preventing it from becoming a mere marketing gimmick.