Tourism strategies and roadmaps for supporting SMEs in Moldova

The National Tourism Office of Moldova is a newly established entity. Until now, Moldova has not had a national policy or strategy for tourism. Therefore, the National Tourism Office was keenly interested in a broad spectrum of sub-topics and eager to receive any advice and information from their European colleagues. 

Beneficiary

• Elena Balatel, National Tourism Office of Moldova

Matchmaking Peers

• Ksenija Tkacenko, Ministry of Economics of the Republic of Latvia

• Nataša Mršol, Lubjana Tourism, Slovenia 

• Anne Furphy, Seville Official Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Navigation, Spain

Moderators

• Mart Veliste, Policy Learning Platform 

• Erik Gloersen, Policy Learning Platform

• Antoine Duquennoy, Policy Learning Platform

• First, identify a vision and key principles on which to base your action. Make sure this vision and these principles are clearly communicated to potential cooperation partners at all levels (e.g. on your institutional website).
• Second, explore ways of optimising the evidence base for tourism policies. What can be measures using existing data? How can these data be complemented by regular surveys or targeted studies? In this context, inspiration can be drawn by existing initiatives focusing on measuring tourism sustainability. 
   
• Third, initiate a network with stakeholders, with specific focus on SMEs and local communities. A smart approach to this may be to focus on pilot areas with a more favourable starting position, e.g. particularly attractive sites or amenities, well-established dialogue and cooperation among local actors. The objective would be to help these pilot areas reach well-identified objective through collective action. Collective achievements create a favourable basis for further cooperation within the pilot area, but also makes it attractive for other areas to join your networking initiative. The objective of such a “snowballing” strategy is to progressively arrive establish networks of cooperation covering the entire country.
   
• Fourth, considering that one of the challenges can be building trust towards a new public institution, it is advised to establish top-to-bottom feedback loops across the districts and municipalities. Coordinators on these different governance levels could provide input to the National Tourism Agency as well as spread the word on initiatives and support programmes to potential beneficiaries on the local level. This would also ensure that the policy interventions are designed by keeping in mind the needs and concerns of those operating on a local level. In this regard, it is still important for the National Agency representatives to also go “to the field” and meet the various stakeholders regularly.
   
• Fifth, establish targeted financing mechanism to support SME development within the framework of the adopted vision and key principles. Inspiration may in this respect be drawn from the TOURBO voucher system, which is currently being tested as part of a pilot action. It would be interesting to explore whether EU pre-accession support could be channelled to the support of SMEs in the tourism sector, and if such support could be inspired by good practices in the use of ERDF funding within the EU.
   
• Sixth, many international cooperation networks on sustainable tourism development were mentioned by the peers (e.g. NECSTouR). It is worth exploring if it could be purposeful to join some of these networks at this stage, based on their added value for tourism policy design and implementation. The Interreg Europe good practice database is also a resource that can be mobilised.