The pitch of the student team Daily Escape has won them the Dragons’ Den of the Destination Development (Tourism Management) minor. For this minor, fourth-year students were tasked with setting up a business to facilitate ‘meaningful interactions’ between tourists and the local population in Morocco.

The students had gone to Tangier, Morocco, to look for inspiration for the development of a tourism product. The winning group, Daily Escape, came up with a self-guided cultural tour with game elements, supported by a smartphone app, which led them to develop the ‘Escape the medina tour’.

Solving riddles
The app introduces tourists to Hamza, who is originally from Tangier, and his wife Michelle, the reason he moved to the Netherlands. They are visiting Tangier and Hamza wants to impress his wife. By helping him achieve his goal, you can earn the title of ‘master’. To do so, you must interact with local residents to solve riddles. The game includes storytelling throughout, as Hamza talks about different places that had an impact on his youth. For example, he always went to the same bakery and had a part-time job at a rug store when he was a teenager. The game can be played at any time and can also be paused.

Lost
Nadine and Michael explain how they came up with this idea. ‘We just kind of walked around in Tangier’s medina (the old district). Over the course of a couple of days, we walked quite a lot. We even got lost once!’, Nadine recalls. Michael adds, ‘Eventually, we got to know the area better, and the more time we spent there, the more details we noticed about the surroundings and the culture. At a certain point, things struck us from an entirely different perspective. How amazing is that?’

‘We talked to a lot of “locals” about the things we came across,’ Nadine continues, ‘since we didn’t have a tour guide or anything. Even so, we learned a lot this way.’ ‘And that’s how we developed our own tour and added storytelling to it,’ Michael concludes.

Jury
The students were given the opportunity to present their tourism product to a jury consisting of professionals in the industry, in a Dragons’ Den format. The ‘dragons’ (members of the jury) were representatives from ING, Koning Aap, Amsterdam Odyssey, Passie voor Marokko, Recrout, AllSensing, Better Places, Glimpse, Eliza was here, FP Academy and Green Travel.

During the presentation, the dragons quickly realised that all members of the group were equally enthusiastic and that everyone had contributed their fair share, which they heartily approved of. An interesting detail was that the team had assured lecturer/supervisor Swen Waterreus, a week in advance, that they would win the Dragons’ Den on his behalf. What began as a joke turned into reality!

Customised business trip
The runner-up, ‘Be Ready’, came up with a concept that combined culture, relaxation and learning with a customised business trip, for employees at multinationals that are interested in doing business with Morocco, but haven’t done so yet. Besides storytelling and gamification, other teams also looked at mindfulness, Moroccan cuisine and old Moroccan crafts as important elements for their tourism products.

Coordinator Manon Joosten is very satisfied with the results. ‘It’s great that so many dragons were willing to participate as members of our jury, and we got some pretty impressive names as well. I’m ecstatic that our team of lecturers managed to organise this and very proud of our students!’

Amsterdam is grappling with the repercussions of mass tourism. In fact, the city is suffering from a 'tourism surplus', with large numbers of tourists causing annoyance to local residents. Inholland University of Applied Sciences, the North Amsterdam Tourism Industry Platform (TOP) and Pakhuis de Zwijger decided it was high time to exchange knowledge. The partners joined forces to organise the Fair Tourism Urban Conference during the WeMakeThe.City (WMTC) festival in Amsterdam.

Sustainable co-creation innovations from cities throughout Europe will be presented at the Fair Tourism conference in the afternoon of Tuesday 18 June. The event will explore Amsterdam – and, more specifically, Amsterdam-Noord – from an international perspective. Amsterdam will need all its stakeholders to take responsibility and develop more inclusive and sustainable forms of tourism. How can local businesses, local government agencies and residents work together to change the way tourists spend their time and money in the city?

Digital nomadism
The day's first keynote speaker Claudio Milano, lecturer and researcher at the Ostelea School of Tourism & Hospitality in Barcelona, sees the boundaries between tourists and local residents blurring: we are seeing the rise of digital nomadism, whereby new, temporary residents flow into our cities and countries.

Charles Landry, an author and international advisor on the future of cities, also makes reference to a nomadic world: a growing number of people are travelling the globe. Businesspeople, refugees, students, tourists. Our notions of space, location and time are in flux. For example, public spaces are increasingly multifunctional and can no longer be pigeon-holed in terms of design or image. As a case in point, he mentions a Berlin bank designed to look like a meditation centre. These days, we also tend to spend more time in the virtual world than the physical one.

Meaningful encounters
Rather than focusing on the obvious problems of mass tourism, Landry takes a broader view: "How do we create meaningful encounters and relationships in a transforming world? What do we take from our environment, and what do we have to give in return?' Cities that currently hold less appeal to ambitious modern-day nomads can take fate into their own hands. 'Find your unique niches!' This will help ensure a more even distribution of travellers and residents. The two men both envisage a key role for governance. 'The political field isn't keeping pace with the changes around us", Landry explains.

The keynote speeches will be followed by contributions from Fairbnb and www.untouristguide.com, two initiatives that benefit the city and local economy. Ewout Versloot of Rotterdam and Partners will share his experiences with Rotterdam's new tourism policy, which is primarily focused around the city's needs and tourists' potential contribution to these goals. Various special projects have been established as a part of this strategy.

A home for creators
Everyone head for Amsterdam-Noord! Eva de Klerk of TOP Amsterdam-Noord explains: "We are a home to creators and many community-based initiatives. These ideas tend to attract various subcultures once they start to take shape." While she would also like to see new tourism policies, she feels these should be co-designed by the community. "We want a seat at the table in order to develop policies with municipal authorities, businesses and other stakeholders."

TOP assigned Inholland Tourism students to develop a profile of visitors to Amsterdam-Noord. As student Coen van der Meer explains, their research showed that visitors generally don't read up on Amsterdam-Noord before visiting. They basically come to see the IAMSTERDAM letters, A'DAM Tower and Eye museum, and have no idea about the other sights and activities. The students advised TOP to create a hotspot next to the Eye film museum, with features such as a large playground, fountain or arts centre.

IJamaze
Another group of students developed ‘IJamaze’, a platform that allows tourists and local residents to take part in joint activities. "Tourists get to experience an authentic part of Amsterdam-Noord, while local residents have a sense of ownership over the activities", explains student Kathleen Umbdenstov.

The conference ended with a panel debate on potential solutions to Amsterdam's tourist surplus: should we simply restrict tourism in certain areas? Perhaps we should make more efforts to involve residents in local activities? The issues prove difficult to resolve: plenty of room for further debate, in other words.