Calypso (social tourism)

Social tourism proves that economic and employment opportunities, key goals within the Lisbon strategy, can indeed be generated by increasing tourism accessibility for additional strata of the European population.

By facilitating tourism access in European Destinations for society groups for which going on holiday represents a difficult or even impossible undertaking, social tourism strengthens the tourism industry's revenue generation potential.
It enables off-season tourism to be developed, particularly in regions where tourism is well developed but highly seasonal, whilst giving the opportunity to relatively unknown, small or emerging destinations to promote their offer amongst a wider spectrum of the European population.

Accordingly, social tourism encourages the creation of longer-lasting employment opportunities in the tourism sector by making it possible to extend such jobs beyond the respective peak season.

New Calypso Video (2011)

 Main actions in the first two years (2009-2010)

• The Creation of an Expert Group
• The CALYPSO study on ‘Tourism exchanges in Europe: Enhancing employment, extending the seasonality spread, strengthening European citizenship and improving regional/local economies through the development of social tourism’.
  The study focused on 5 main tasks:
  1. to catalogue Good Practices
  2. to scope target groups
  3. to suggest mechanisms to increase tourism exchanges in Europe
  4. to suggest ways to improve attractiveness of the scheme
  5. to undertake a survey in the non-participating countries to explore and to assess whether they could be interested in participating from subsequent stages of the preparatory action.

• Organization of seven Awareness Building Meetings of 2009 and Meetings Facilitating Exchanges in 2010 seeking to identify mechanisms to facilitate attractively priced tourism exchanges between different countries in the low season. These were organised across all parts of Europe (Poland, Romania, Italy, France, Spain & Belgium).

• Production of communications material.
  These included the creation of a logo, the production of lamas and a promotional leaflet "Calypso Widens Europe`s Travel Horizons" (in different languages) which can be found at the bottom of this page.
• Launch of a call for proposals aiming at supporting tourism-related public authorities to be able to undertake in the forthcoming future trans-national low season exchanges in the CALYPSO target groups.

Specific objectives of the call :

1. to Support Public Authorities in setting up, developing and/or strengthening CALYPSO office infrastructures in their country.
2. to provide networking opportunities and enhancing collaboration between public authorities with the ultimate aim of promoting low season exchanges in any one or more of the four CALYPSO target groups.
3. to conduct relevant studies that could improve the state of art in participating countries and eventually facilitate low season exchanges.

See also :
Call for Proposals TOU 10 711 CALYPSO Facilitating transnational low season exchanges in Europe through the development of social tourism