Secrets of Lake Saimaa
“Secrets of Lake Saimaa” brings Finnish and foreign travelers to the world’s most beautiful lake nature and the most interesting cultural experiences, both on site and virtually. The aim of the project is to build a “Secrets of Lake Saimaa” cultural tourism complex, which combines the expertise of cultural operators, existing cultural and natural sites, the story heritage collected from the area, and tourism and welfare services. For the new entity, a cultural tourism productization and sales model is being developed, where multidisciplinary cultural, tourism and well-being services are actively produced. The new model is based on experimental development methods, with which the project implementers have very good experiences. The services are exported to existing national and international sales and marketing channels and directly to tour operators.
The wonderful Saimaa Geopark area, where cultural tourism products and services are located, is the basis and platform of the project. In sales and marketing, the current sales and marketing channels of Geopark and goSaimaa are utilized.
There are too few operators in Finland who bring together representatives of different industries and use their expertise to produce cultural tourism services. In the project, a new productization and brokerage model is being developed, with which similar products and services can be made in the future as well. In order for the method of operation to be financially viable, development must be connected to sales and marketing. One of the measures of the project is to enter the products and services into selected marketing and sales channels, such as Mystay, Bókun, the Lakeland experiences sales channel, the Outdoor Active nature tourism portal, and goSaimaa’s marketing channels.
In the development of new products, attention is paid from the beginning to meeting Visit Finland’s new internationalization criteria in 2021. The resulting products meet nationally defined needs and quality requirements.
Objectives
The purpose and goal of the project is related to the need of South Karelia and at the same time the whole of Finland to get high-quality cultural tourism products/services to the national and international markets, which have been implemented as a collaboration between different industries. The goal is based on a challenge that has emerged in many surveys and studies, i.e. the lack of cooperation between cultural and art sector operators and tourism sector operators in product development and subsequent business operations.
| Duration (päivämäärinä): | 01.06.2021 – 30.06.2023 |
| Project manager: | Juha Iso-Aho |
| Email: | juha.iso-aho@humak.fi |
| Partners: | Saimaa Geopark, GoSaimaa Oy, Kulttuuritila Nuijamies, Humak University of Applied Sciences, |
| Funder: | Opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriö |
| Budget: | Alle tai 50 000 euroa |
