WSA 2020
Like last year, I’m one of the online jurors for this year’s World Summit Awards, in the Culture & Tourism category.
Two types of submissions stood out for their originality. The first is the offering of tours for which ‘sustainability’ is a core feature, typically through somehow accredited local service providers. The other is offering high-quality and hyper-local short tours of specific destinations.
The former is interesting as a general trend, though I’m not convinced of its ultimate sustainable success, as providing tours like this requires more effort and more cost, making them much less competitive in the market, even if there is a core group of tourists and travellers that could be interested in more environmentally and socially sustainable travel options.
The second is interesting due to my personal interests and history. Two years ago, when we won with The Museum of Yesterday, with which we pioneered the idea of mixing location-based gaming with history, journalism and tourism. In 2019, the WSA saw a few submissions somewhat similar to this, but now the quality of those offering similar services has increases and broadened. Though, still, the same problem persists, as replicability is very limited, because creating individual offerings need to be hand-crafted from start to finish.