The Waddendijk as a "Leisure Landscape"

Does the northern Wadden coast, currently mostly a transit area for tourists on their way to the islands, have the potential for tourist and leisure development? The characteristics of a rural area bordering the World Heritage Wadden Sea would suggest that it does, but the challenge is to combine the attractiveness of a tourist area with the strict requirements of coastal protection.


Waddendijk Think Tank
In 2013 ETFI took the initiative of creating a 'Waddendijk think tank' with regional stakeholders representing the housing corporations, coastal protection, architecture, cultural festivals and tourist development. The conclusion was that any future development should respect not only coastal safety, but also the natural and cultural specifics of the area. Two ideas became key in the work of this think tank: the concept of Building with Nature, which seeks to integrate natural processes into the coastal protection system, and the idea of a Cultural Route with landscape art, leading to a kind of permanent Oerol festival on the continental shore. The Estuaire project in Nantes (France) would be a good example of a similar development.

What is scenario planning?

Explanatory video on scenario planning (in Dutch, English subtitles).

International Tourism Futures Conference

Panel discussion: the Future of Tourism and the Future of Tourism Education

From November 2-5, 2011, the European Tourism Futures Institute organized the 'Tourism Futures' conference at Stenden University, as a meeting for international futurologists, tourism researchers and professionals with the objective to find and discuss answers to the situations tourism will face in the next decades. Conference topics were the hotel of the future, creative cities/city-sumers, slow marketing and the global shift of political power. As keynotes the programme featured Márcio Favilla, as Director of Competitiveness at UNWTO and dr. Katharina Grünberg, from the scenario team at Shell, about their organisations’ tourism future study and scenario studies in general, respectively. Ari Björkqvist presented Haaga-Helia’s project on the future of hotels and conference centers, while Ian Yeoman looked at the hotel of the future from the perspective of the future of sleep.

The international conference was combined with the regionally oriented Fryske Toerisme Kongresdei.

Conference website: http://www.etfi.eu/conference.
Conference presentations can be downloaded from http://www.etfi.eu/conference/programme .

Future or Futures?

(Opening of the Academic Year 2011-12)



Today I have been asked to give an extremely short presentation about the European Tourism Futures Institute. I believe that time will be sufficient to concentrate only on one single letter in the name of the institute: that will be the S that turns future into a plural futures.
When this name was first launched, we were asked whether this was a mistake: can you speak of multiple futures, while everyone knows there is just one future? This is a deliberate choice of our institute, that is crucial for our research strategy.

Leeuwarden in search of tomorrow's tourist

Newspaper article (Leeuwarder Courant, April 28, 2011) on a workshop organized by Stenden's European Tourism Futures Institute and delivered by dr. Ian Yeoman, at the local City Hall: