The Councillor's Office for Tourism promotes the exchange of best practices in nautical, cultural and food-and-wine tourism.

Stakeholders from the local tourist sector visit Reus, La Ràpita and Palamós to learn about successful tourism management and promotion experiences.

Via its Councillor's Office for Tourism, Sitges City Council is continuing to roll out the project associated with the EU Next Generation Destination Tourism Sustainability Plans (DTSP) as part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. Within this project, in April and May the technical secretaries of cultural, nautical and wine-and-food tourism made three technical visits or exchanges of experiences (called benchmarking in the field of marketing) with stakeholders from the local tourism sector to learn about success stories and best practices in other Catalan destinations.

This initiative is part of the tourism product development and co-creation phase of the technical secretariats, after the diagnosis sessions, the sectoral working committees and the series of training sessions held in recent months. The workdays enabled the participating professionals to learn about real experiences in tourism management, promotion and sales.

The benchmarks were developed in Reus, La Ràpita and Palamós and focused respectively on cultural, nautical and food-and-wine tourism. These sessions of best practices shared tourism management models, product experiences and initiatives to showcase the heritage, the sea and local cuisine through technical meetings and immersive experiences linked to each region. They also created spaces of exchange, inspiration and networking among professionals. The Councillor for Tourism, Xavi Ripoll, highlighted the office's commitment ‘to a model of tourism governance, innovation and shared knowledge that contributes to developing more sustainable, competitive tourism aligned with Sitges’s identity’.

The conclusions and lessons learned from these exchanges will now be worked on in the participatory product-creation workshops scheduled for May, with the goal of defining new experiences and tourist proposals associated with the three sectors analysed.

About Destination Tourism Sustainability Plans – EU Next Generation

In May 2023, Sitges received €5 M as part of the Destination Tourism Sustainability Plans financed by EU Next Generation funds within the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. Eleven projects are currently underway. The finalisation date is 30 June 2026, and with these initiatives the aim is to improve tourist governance, foster specialisation and boost the destination’s competitiveness through the creation of stable spaces for work in these sectors, as well as improving residents’ quality of life and visitors’ experience.