The European Commission launched many initiatives in the last few years for the development of accessible tourism, in order to increase the awareness and availability of accessible destinations and products across Europe. Its latest products, the studies on Demand, Training and Supply, describe a situation where a lot of steps forward have been completed but which is still lacking in homogeneity, in a more widespread availability of accessible destinations and offers and in their managerial quality.

In particular, the capacity of existing training offer to reach the final users, businesses and public bodies, still deserves a wider attention and efforts to make the EC investments profitable in terms of increased quality and managerial capacity by SMEs operating in the tourism sector.

APP TOUR YOU aims at qualifying human resources in the tourism sector by designing and developing multi-facet training tools on accessibility issues, addressed and tailored to tourism SMEs. Besides a basic knowledge of the tourism for all topic, these training tools will aim at providing workers in the tourism sector with the skills needed to correctly describe the characteristics of usability of their premises and services by tourists with specific needs, through a full understanding of the Design for All concepts and the use of self-assessment tools.

This expertise will meet one of the major critical issues of people with disability when travelling: the availability of reliable, verified and update information on the usability of their destination offer from the point of view of all possible tourism activities to be performed there.

These skills will be particularly important for SMEs, which represent the group of tourism offer with major appeal for tourist with average spending capability.

Thanks to training tools developed by the project, they will be able to be visible on the web, with a reliable description of their offer, reaching a target whom they are normally overlooking as they feel not experienced enough to be able to cater for them properly.

To reach its objectives the project will develop the following main activities:

• - implementation of a blended training course to train 16 operators of tourism SMEs to become trainers / facilitators in the field of tourism for all and accessibility assessment. On the basis of a defined training path and with the support of a produced training kit, the 16 operators will be trained online on the basic principles of tourism for all and face-to face on how to collect and provide information on the characteristics of usability of tourism facilities by people with specific needs
• design and production of a self-learning mobile application to help tourism operators to make a self-assessment of their facilities and to give back the gathered information. The App will be designed and developed through a bottom up approach, with the help of the tourism operators trained in the blended course
• design and definition of the training path and kit of a Massive Open Online Course for the qualification of hospitality workers in the field of accessibility, with a focus on the collection and release of information on the usability of tourism facilities by tourists with specific needs. Also the design of the MOOC training kit will follow a bottom up approach, with the involvement of the tourism operators trained in the blended course
• testing of the Massive Open Online Course on tourism accessibility, services assessment and information involving at least 250 managers and staff of EU tourism SMEs who will be assisted, during the course, by the tourism operators trained to become MOOC tutors/facilitators. The MOOC will be supported by an open highly interactive platform, hosted by ENAT portal, where the trainees will have the possibility to dialogue with their peers and with partners’ experts
• production of a Manual of sustainability and replicability of the MOOC to allow the transferability of the project training tools and experiences both to other EU countries and to other stakeholders in the different categories of the tourism service chain
• dissemination and exploitation of the MOOC and the main project results through conferences in the partner countries, newsletters, social media, etc. In order to broaden its impacts and extend its benefits over time, all material produced and used by APP TOUR YOU will be open and available in the project website and through ENAT portal as means to produce quality information on accessibility to be put in the European Directory of Accessible Tourism PANTOU.

Moreover, after the end of the project, ENAT will continue to host the MOOC structure that will have the chance to be reused in a “connectivist form” (without trainers and webinars but sharing materials, comments, blogs and experience) by interested stakeholders: groups of self-gathered learners, national or international networks, local public institutions.