Edinburgh Napier University

  The proposed project aims to:
• Firstly expand the Eco-Destinet Network with the inclusion of leading European ecotourism and sustainable tourism quality schemes, networks of stakeholders and training institutes; and
• secondly to create a set of practical online tools for assessing the EETLS compliance, available to ecotourism practitioners and the awarding organisations. These tools will introduce a cost-effective way to assess compliance with EETLS and its eventual award, in an effort to increase the potential of the EETLS being adopted by a large number of ecotourism businesses or rural tourism businesses who would like to expand their services to ecotourism; and national-regional quality schemes across Europe. The online evaluation will most probably need to be complemented by on-site evaluation, but the latter will be limited in frequency, thus cutting greatly the awarding and monitoring costs. This project will benefit Edinburgh napier in the following ways: a) Involve us in a new EU wide network for Eco-tourism; b) May create potential new consultancy opportunities for the Faculty; c) Project will create new case studies that will be applied in our existing MSc Eco Tourism & Conservation & management of protected areas; d) Will develop new e-learning objects which can be applied in afore-mentioned courses.