FUTURE-PROOF CITY TRIPS

The main research focus of ACEEPT 2023: “Future-Proof City Trips” will be how to keep city trips relevant, how to keep cities appealing as flourishing, sustainable tourism destinations in the future. As a main target group, we will focus on “the young urban travelers”: They love doing city-trips, but they have seen most of the famous overrun A-cities (see below), and they look for something more and something different.

So, which cities shall we focus on? Not the famous mass-tourism cities like many of us have one in our home countries (Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin etc.): the so called Alpha- cities or A-cities.

Instead, we chose to put our focus towards the Beta- cities or secondary cities: this does not mean these cities are less interesting or less beautiful to explore: it only means that they are less known, especially to the foreign visitor. That is exactly the reason why these beta-cities hold a lot of potential for city tourism in each of our countries.

The benefits and opportunities are multiple:

• to reduce mass tourism to the overrun A-cities
• to spread out tourism over various (secondary) cities in your country
• to enhance tourism to cities that still have growing potential
• to achieve a more balanced and a more sustainable tourism reality

We believe that this topic is highly relevant for all of you:

You, tourism students

You, soon-to-be tourism professionals

You, the young urban travelers of the future!

In the various pre-tasks before and during the project week itself, we will explore this topic from different angles: what does it mean for your own national tourism reality: your own beta-cities?

What does it mean for host country Belgium?

What does it mean specifically for Beta-city Antwerp, our home base during the project week? Let’s find out…

WELCOME to BELGIUM, WELCOME to ACEEPT 2023!