Last September 18th, the Charente Region (France) – received the CreativeFriendlyDestination label. This label was delivered to the President of Charentes Tourisme, Stéphane Villain by the director of the Creative Tourism Network®, Caroline Couret, during an event that brought together elected officials and local stakeholders from the member municipalities of this project in the city of Jonzac.
This label validates a sustainable development process aimed at co-creating creative tourism experiences with local artists and artisans, which highlight not only their know-how but also the cultural DNA of the territories concerned, via a virtuous and diverse tourism offer able to attract travelers throughout the year.
Charente Tourism thus joins the labeled destinations of this global network, such as Barcelona, Recife (Brazil), Les Iles de la Madeleine (Quebec), Barcelos (Portugal), Cebu (Philippines) or Cannes (France), to name just a few which, beyond their diversity, share the same strategy to develop regenerative tourism, based on a creative and circular economy model.
Indeed, while tourism has been at the heart of the debates for several years, the Charentes has made it THE solution to boost its territories – through the Villages and Landscapes Club – whose aim is to foster an experiential dimension, capable of creating new business opportunities for the local stakeholders involved in the tourism and hospitality sectors, arts and crafts, and creative industries, and thus consolidating a territorial ecosystem.
Thus, in just a few weeks, more than twenty experiences have been designed by the local creative people, via training sessions and technical visits, led by the Creative Tourism Network®.
Among the creative experiences proposed, travelers and residents can participate in a wide array of workshops, namely: leatherwork, stained glass, straw marquetry, ceramics, marbled paper, candle making, woodturning, linen or felt work, and wine production, to name just a few within an offer that continues to grow.
As Stéphane Villain pointed out, “In a context of redoubled optimization of our resources and actions, we at Charentes Tourisme are committed to developing and further boosting cooperative projects such as thematic clubs linked to priority sectors in the Charentes region.
This new “Villages et Paysages” club created in 2023 brings together 18 Charentes municipalities with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, committed to a quality approach with a cultural, heritage and environmental offer on a human scale. »
Caroline Couret, congratulated the pioneering nature of the project as well as its assets to position the Charente territories and know-how among the most significant destinations for this type of tourism, at the global level.
Among these assets, Couret highlighted the fact that this project is born from the desire to make creative tourism a vector of development that benefits the entire territory via the promotion of artistic crafts and the involvement of creative industries.
She welcomed “the engagement of all local stakeholders, public and private, from the first phase of the project. A key factor to guarantee this type of tourism’s authenticity. »
Couret recalls that “creative tourism is supported by the United Nations with which the Creative Tourism Network® collaborates, for its virtues in favor of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.”
The objective is to respond to very specific requests from new tourist profiles – whether local, national or international, eager to (re)discover French know-how while recreating economic and social links at the territorial level. And in this, the Charente project is already presented as a model, since it will be presented by Couret as part of the G20 in Brazil.
As for promotional and commercial actions, these workshops are already promoted at local, national and international levels, as part of a common strategy between the Tourist Offices of the territories concerned, those of Charentes Tourisme, as well as the various actions organized by the Creative Tourism Network® throughout the world.
