North Atlantic Tourism Association

The project, established by associate Ingi Thor, was set up to develop and trial new ideas and initiatives between the culture, heritage and tourism sectors to support the repositioning of the North-Atlantic Region as a cultural destination. Specifically, across Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland.

This pilot project was designed to identify ways to develop partnerships, and how experiences could be shaped to appeal to potential new culturally-motivated visitor markets, support sustainable growth and minimise the impact on three extraordinary environments.

We drafted a carefully-researched provocation paper outlining tourism trends for the Nordic Region and the opportunities that cultural tourism could provide for the region. Meetings and workshops followed in Reykjavík, Tórshavn and Copenhagen, exploring current partnership working, knowledge and expertise around cultural tourism and potential opportunities for collaboration.

We worked with tourism and inward investment partners to form a compact set of ambitious but deliverable recommendations addressing target markets, metrics, trans-national partnership working, mapping high-potential and must-see experiences, building cultural tourism provision into national, capital city and regional strategies, benchmarking and the development of a cultural narrative and place branding. National and trans-national adoption of many of these have seen a dramatic increase in profile and performance for cultural tourism.