Small and medium sized companies in the tourist sector nowadays face a lot of challenges. Along with accelerating globalization, flights have become cheaper, and the mobility of European citizens is increasing. As a result, the tourist sector faces the need to cater for an increasingly wide range of clients from different countries with different tastes and expectations. Besides changes in the tourist market, there is a growing use of information and communication technologies in the business. The computer is used more intensively in the organization of work and communciations, and internet has become a crucial medium to attract and inform potential customers.
How to deal with these and other challenges in the tourist sector? To stay competitive with large tourist organizations, small and medium sized companies have to develop and innovate permanently.
To be able to develop and innovate, this project believes the best approach is to work and learn together. A good example of how collaboration between SMEs can stimulate innovation is the Snowpark community.
The Work and Learn Together Project aims to support small and medium sized companies in creating connections between them and with experts in the field, and making it possible to collaborate and learn how to deal with challenges they all face.
To achieve this goal online working groups with SMEs are created and supervised. We call these groups communities. Currently, there are several online communities that have started to work and learn together. There are both national and international groups of SMEs, in differents fields in the tourist sector, such as: