Starting from August 2013 Tourist Association of Ivano-Frankivsk Region will launch the Action “Eastern European Pearls:development and promotion of transboundary city tourism products”. The Action will be financed by the European Union within the framework of the Cross-Border Cooperation Programme Poland-Belarus-Ukraine 2007-2013. The main project implementing partners are the Executive Committee of Ivano-Frankivsk City Council, Kolomyia City Hall, Tourism Office of the Department “Euro 2012” of Lviv City Council (Ukraine), Lublin Regional Tourist Organization, and Fundacja Akademia Obywatelska (Poland).
The overall project goal is to increase the annual number of visitors to the six selected cities – Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kolomiya (Ukraine), Lublin, Zamocs and Przeworsk (Poland) – as the key city cultural tourist centers of Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland.
The specific objectives of the project are to improve the quality of experience and tourism offer of the cultural and historical heritage in the target cities by introducing new interpretation facilities for visitors, to strengthen and promote the cultural identity of the target cities as tourism cultural destinations, to build cooperation and experience exchange in the sphere of city cultural tourism between counterparts in Ukraine and Poland and thus unify the efforts and increase the marketing potential of the targeted cities For all project target cities tourism development is a critical factor for local economic development and development of the surrounding territories. Altogether 1,5 million people live in these cities and a similar number of people visit annually. There are over three thousand outstanding historical and architectural monuments of local, national and global importance located here. Each city has its own identity, history and cultural connections to the past and to the future. The historical centers of Lviv and city of Zamość located nearby Lublin are included in the UNESCO register of World Heritage Sites.
Due to their common history, the cities on both sides of the border have many common features; relating to the residing of ethnically similar communities and their transborder economy. At the same time a contrasting nature between these cities is vivid, both in size and location. The underlying concept of the proposed action is to combine the efforts of all the organizations, whose operations are associated with tourism and, by utilizing their developments, transform local tourism into an industry, which is beneficial to all who reside, work, and visit these cities.
According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, individual tourists make up 70% of the total number of tourists and bring the greatest revenue with lower leakage, thus money spent by the individual visitor is likely to find its way into the local economy, and therefore to ignore this market segment is short sighted.
Thus the project aims to build an interpretation system tailored specifically for the city cultural tourism visitor. Through the system of interpretation the cities will be able to motivate their visitors to stay one day longer, as well as to generate targeted visits to these cities by tourists interested in culture and history.
Within the Action the Project Partners plan to create exclusive audio tours allowing visitors to exercise independent walking without a guide by listening excursions through portable media devices, to produce detailed informative maps of historical parts of target cities (covered within the self guided excursions) reflecting the course and stop places of the audio tours; to facilitate the self guided excursions with on-site interpretation and information signs placed alongside the walking routes and correlated with the content of audio excursions.
The Project will also produce a number of publications that will help to promote and market all project products and facilities in particular, and project target cities as city cultural destinations or a single tour destination in general (special joint cities’ cultural tour promotion brochure, tourist city guides, informational leaflets and posters, a series of thematic articles). The promotion campaign within the project also will target travel writers and international tour operators’ visits. In addition the Project foresees a number of trainings and Transfrontier city cultural tourism operators’ forum.
