Restat
RESTAT
The aim of the RESTAT project is to educate staff in the tourism sector about the importance and opportunities of accessible tourism. The project offers several tools to help tourism professionals offer accessible destinations and tourist products.
What is Accessible Tourism
Accessible tourism is the effort to provide tourist experiences that can be experienced by anyone, regardless of their special needs, disabilities or age. In order to make tourism accessible, physical barriers that could limit the mobility of certain groups must be removed. Effective communication with people with special needs must be ensured and those involved in tourism must be made aware of the special needs that their customers may have and how they can be solved. Accessible tourism must be inclusive, so it does not involve creating special experiences for groups with special needs, but creating tourist experiences that can be accessed by anyone, regardless of their particularities.
People with special needs
Accessible tourism does not only involve awareness of the needs of people with disabilities. People with special needs are not necessarily people with disabilities. People with special needs may be those who have food allergies, people with reduced mobility, the elderly, pregnant women, parents with strollers or those with cognitive or intellectual difficulties. Special needs can be permanent or temporary.
RESTAT in numbers
number of partners
number of transnational meetings
project time span
number of trainees
people expected to gain a better job
estimated number of tourism professionals influenced
Project Summary
În afară de bariere arhitecturale, resursele umane reprezintă cel mai mare obstacol în calea promovării și implementării turismului accesibil. Credem ca acest fapt este datorat unei lipse de conștientizare datorate rarității cursurilor de formare în domeniu și lipsei unui plan centralizat de formare. Proiectul RESTAT (REcognizing Skills to Transform Accessible Tourism) are ca obiectiv abordarea acestor lipsuri, oferind soluții pentru a le conferi celor implicați în turism competența de a fi pregătiți și disponibili să ofere experiențe diversificate și personalizate turiștilor cu nevoi speciale.
Apart from architectural barriers, human resources are the biggest obstacle to promoting and implementing accessible tourism. We believe that this is due to a lack of awareness due to the scarcity of training courses in the field and the lack of a centralised training plan. The RESTAT project (REcognizing Skills to Transform Accessible Tourism) aims to address these shortcomings, offering solutions to give those involved in tourism the competence to be prepared and available to offer diversified and personalised experiences to tourists with special needs.
Who is helped by RESTAT:
- Tourism workers and professionals who aspire to provide higher quality tourism services
- Tourism managers and training providers who want to help those in their area to provide good quality accessible tourism services
- Central and local authorities looking for tourism development options
- Employers and employment agencies
- People with and without special needs will benefit from the new knowledge of tourism professionals.
Project Products:
IO1
A Study to identify a set of desirable accessible tourism skills that are likely to be accumulated by workers in tourism at work. The study will classify a set of Job Mobility Opportunities for those working in accessible tourism. This study will serve as a framework for the following project products.
IO2
A Skills Endorsing Tool to objectively evaluate, recognize and even classify the level of skills tourism workers have regarding AT through successful completion of a series of testing devices.
IO3
An Upskilling Course with a specific intemediate level training module, useful for both tourism workers and managers in rendering their services more professional, well-planned, entertaining and tailor-made to different special needs.
IO4
A Career Guidance Tool to boost Employability and Job Mobility of Tourism Professionals point them to the most suitable career options basing on both of their validated skills and personal characteristics.
In the long run, RESTAT aims to make Accessible Tourism a vibrant economic sector in smaller towns’ context with a well-prepared workforce to enforce sustainable development, responsible tourism and the social value of equal opportunity. It also aspires to contribute to Europe’s harmonization schemes for recognizing, validating and better utilizing workers’ skills and qualifications.
Rogepa’s contribution to the project
Adaptation and Translation of Information
The project is based on information from the regions of all partners, so Rogepa is responsible for providing, structuring and translating information about accessible tourism in Romania, especially in the Maramureș area. The translation and adaptation in Romanian of the information contributed by other partners helps the visibility of the project in Romania.
Resources
for evaluation
Rogepa coordinates the second product of the project, the online platform for assessing the existing skills of those working in the tourism sector. For this purpose we use our technical expertise but also our knowledge about training to develop learning and assessment resources.
Training
and Orientation Resources
The third and fourth products of the project involve the development of a course and a career guidance tool aimed at improving the skills and employability of tourism professionals. These products highlight accessible tourism as a tool that improves the quality, profitability and market share of tourism service providers.
Web
Design
The project website is an important resource for disseminating information. We are accredited to structure, build and update the RESTAT website in the 6 languages of the project. We also develop visual resources to help illustrate the content of the website. We make sure that the legal conditions for the website are met. The content of the website is provided by all project partners.
Event
planning
Rogepa hosted a transnational meeting attended by all project partners. During the meeting in Baia Mare we were careful to provide the appropriate space for conversations and presentations, but we also organized optional local trips to help our guests become familiar with the context and level of implementation of accessible tourism.
International
Cooperation
RESTAT is planned in such a way that all partners are involved in most aspects of the project. Remote cooperation is thus a crucial element in the development of the project. The communication and management of the project uses Basecamp for structuring the information, we collaborate using Google Sheets and Google Docs and we hold meetings on Skype. We also participate in the 5 transnational meetings in the project implementing countries.
Project Partners:
Tusa Municipality
The coordinator of the project is the Municipality of Tusa. Tusa is located 90 kilometers east of Palermo, in Sicily, Italy and consists of the villages of Castel di Tusa and Milianni, along the Tyrrhenian coast. Due to a recent increase in the flow of tourism, the municipality has improved its accessible tourism services, but the opportunity to improve these services is great in this area. For this reason, the Municipality of Tusa has every interest in the solutions offered by RESTAT being as good as possible.
New Horizons
New Horizons is a non-profit organization located in Tusa, Italy. It was founded in 2016 and is dedicated to promoting social development and cultural preservation of the area. The organization tries to connect local communication, relatively isolated, with the dynamic world outside through education and training, information services, and international cooperation.
ECTE
ECTE is a training institution certified by the Greek Ministry of Education. They provide lifelong learning services in order to promote employability by updating the professional skills of adults or by developing new skills. A major part of the services provided by ECTE are activities to promote youth employment. In addition to training, ECTE also offers career counselling services, innovative guided interventions, international mobility for work or practice.
Foundation Universitat Jaume I Empresa (FUE‑UJI)
EuroFUE-UJI in Castellón, Valencia region, Spain is the international project office of the Jaume I Empresa University Foundation. Their mission is to develop innovative projects together with the university’s research groups and other companies and associations. The European Office has repeatedly been a project leader and partner in consortia in which it has developed communication protocols through proactive information, dialogue, and participation.
Handy Club Ostrava
Handy Club Ostrava is a regional non-profit organization in Ostrava, Czech Republic. It was founded with the aim of bringing together people with physical disabilities, their friends, and other interested entities in order to achieve better social integration of people with disabilities. The most important goal is to reduce the barriers that separate people with disabilities from the common society.
Rogepa
Rogepa is a Romanian-German company active in the regions of Baia Mare and Cluj-Napoca, Romania, the main activity being adult education. The design of training programs, the development of curricula, professional counseling, the design of training materials, the management of European projects, and the planning of national and international events are the areas in which we have experience. We believe in using current technologies to make high-quality training accessible to all.
The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Learn More
If you are interested in RESTAT and want to find out more, visit the project website.