Travelling into the [future] (spanish: Viajando al [futuro]) is a long-term project aimed at developing desirable future scenarios for sustainable tourism in Spain together with local stakeholders and experts in the field. The project is funded by the European Climate Foundation and implemented in a collaboration between Futures Probes and Tipi. 

Process & Methodology

The project was structured into three main phases: Research, Crowdsourcing, Storytelling.

• In the research phase, a PESTLE analysis and the elaboration of local stakeholder maps identified environmental key factors and networks.

• In the crowdsourcing phase, participatory workshops with local stakeholders and a Delphi survey with tourism experts were run in parallel, built upon and at the same time challenging the knowledge gathered in the previous phase. 

• In the Storytelling phase, the results were used as the fundament for building six future scenarios, visualised as a written narrative accompanied by an illustration. 

Outcome

• Building up and strengthening local stakeholder networks and generating ideas for future sustainable tourism(s). Gathering of key insights on desirable, possible and likely future developments of tourism in Spain. 

• Identification and discussion of needs, desires, worries and attitudes of tourism stakeholders – in its complexity and diversity. 

• Six future scenarios to inspire can activate communities, organisations and citizens to define measures that accelerate the transformation towards a better, more sustainable tourism. 

Next steps

• Developing indicators to measure the performance of (future) touristic activities in terms of their sustainability. 

• Creating a network of change agents within the tourism sector to exchange experiences, needs, knowledge and to collectively identify possible synergies and action steps to be taken. 

• Designing experimental pilot projects focusing on solving some of the concrete challenges identified as common to one or all of the regions observed.