SAINT - Slow Adventure In Northern Territories

SAINT is funded by the EU Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme for the period 2015-2018. The project started in April 2015, involving 11 partners with a total grant of 1.1 mill EUR.
“Slow Adventures in Northern Territories” will work with SMEs to make them more aware of how to capitalise on the business opportunities in guided “slow adventure” experiences, offering simple nature-based, immersive journeys, living and travelling in wild places, through marketing to new, distant customer markets. Northern Europe’s wide-open, ‘wild’ spaces provide a great, saleable contrast with the target group’s lives in urban centres around the world. The common challenge is for partners to work with SMEs to overcome issues of peripherality, with restricted local demand and difficult access to international markets. The principal objective is to make SMEs more aware of how to capitalise on business opportunities in guided slow adventure experiences, through extending marketing reach. Outdoor adventure micro-businesses typically lack the resources to investigate and invest in the most effective means to attract these lucrative tourist groups.

The main outputs will be:

• Guidance on a) which new lucrative customer segments to target and how to target them.
• Pilot-tested marketing models to be adopted by companies, with the emphasis on more effective use of ICT.
• A set of clustering approaches for direct application by slow adventure SMEs – economies of scale and effort.
• Guidance on the application of new ICT to improve marketing, and how to improve marketing through the adoption of synthesised modern and Indigenous perspectives.
• The establishment of a new trans-national cluster of SMEs with joint branding/promotion.

Contactperson: Edward Huijbens, professor and head at School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Akureyri, Iceland