Refinery project: Service design workshop of cultural tourism products in Vilnius

Service design workshop of cultural tourism products at its second phase: Testing and learning in Vilnius

The second platform meeting of the project ‘Refinery of Sustainable Cultural Tourism Products in the Northern Dimension Area’ was held in Vilnius, Lithuania on February 28th–March 3rd. The programme touched on the topics of marketing and digital trends and the workshop exercises took the participants outside the conference room to test their ideas with potential customers.

The streets in the old town of Vilnius were crowded when people gathered to experience the traditional St. Casimir’s fair. This was an excellent chance for the service design workshop facilitator Elisa Lahti to send the workshop participants out to the streets to talk to people and collect feedback about their cultural tourism service ideas.

In addition to the development work in the facilitated workshop the programme included inspiring speeches from visiting experts. Augusta Stave from GoVilnius talked about their target groups and told about the results and about the reach of their notoriously famous campaign ‘Vilnius, the G-spot of Europe’. Local expertise was also heard when marketing expert Sandra Bernyte talked about brands and customer relationships. In his presentation Rovaniemi-based entrepreneur Petteri Putkinen from Artor.io talked about digitalization and pondered, among other issues, how to remain a personal touch in services in a world full of digital platforms.

The local culture was not forgotten; the participants got to experience local music and contemporary dance and they were also taken to a guided walking tour to the intriguing and culturally rich neighborhood of Užupis that has declared itself an independent republic and is nowadays a popular cultural tourism attraction.

The third and the last meeting of the project will be held in Finnish Lapland, in Rovaniemi and Inari in early June, right before the Arctic Arts Summit event takes place in Rovaniemi. Between the face-to-face meetings participants work on their service ideas independently and keep in touch with the facilitator through online meetings.

The project is financed by Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and operated by Ministry of Education and Culture, Arts Promotion Centre, Finland in co-operation with regional cultural authorities. Funding has been also granted from the Northern Dimension Partnership on Culture.

More info:

Malla Alatalo, Regional artist/ project coordinator, Arts Promotion Centre Finland

malla.alatalo@taike.fi

+358 295 330 859

Refinery-project enhances the collaboration between the tourism and creative industries within the Barents and Baltic Sea regions in order to create sustainable cultural tourism products and services to the area. Entrepreneurs from the tourism field, tour operators and developers of the Northern Dimension Partnership area, as well as artists and creative professionals who have an interest in creating services for tourists have been invited to join moderated service design workshops.