An innovative LEADER project promotes hiking in the Belgian Eifel area by means of an online hiking planner tool, GPS navigation and a smartphone app.
The Local Action Group (LAG) ‘100 villages - 1 Future’ and the Tourism Agency of East Belgium (TAO) wanted to reorganize and revalue the hiking paths in the LEADER-region. The multitude of existing local hiking paths was insufficiently coordinated with the paths in the neighbouring villages and municipalities. The LAG stimulated cooperation between various local stakeholders such as municipalities, interest groups and tourism associations based on the shared interest in promoting the region. The promoters worked together to develop the content which fed the development of an online hiking planner tool, GPS navigation and smartphone app.
The Virtual Hiking Tours website was visited 22 000 times by 16 500 different users and the Go Eastbelgium app was downloaded 1 200 times.