Mindful Tourism Services for People with Mental Impairment. Situation Scan: Latvia, 2021

Abstract

The report is part of the EU Erasmus + funded project “Mindful tourism services for mentally disordered people” (MindTour). The project aims to promote and support tourism entrepreneurs to value mentally disordered clients and their families as persons and customers and help them design mindful tourism services accessible for mentally disordered people. The project is implemented in cooperation with Estonian, Belgian and Latvian higher education institutions – University of Tartu, Pärnu College (Estonia), Thomas More Mechelen-Antwerpen (Belgium), University of Latvia (Latvia), as well as leisure and tourism service providers - Pärnu Museum (Estonia), Museum Dr Guislain (Belgium) and SIA Zeit Hotel (Latvia). This report reveals the current situation in the use and accessibility of tourism services for people with mental impairment in Latvia. Researchers of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the University of Latvia Agita Lūse, Liene Rācene, Diāna Popova, Nadezhda Pazuhina and Aija van der Steina researched in the autumn and spring semesters of the academic year 2020/2021, using both secondary data sources and gathering primary data through interviews with social service providers and tourism service providers, as well as participant observation and mapping of services, involving people with GRT in the consumption of tourism services.

Accessibility and smart tourism: tourism for all and reducing inequalities: a tourism agenda 2030

“…Yet, tourism accessibility or tourism for all is not mentioned in the Guidelines for Tourism Development in Latvia (Ministry of Economics of the Republic of Latvia, 2014). Further, the Action Plan for Tourism Development in Latvia for 2021-2027, in addition to marketing communication activities for the promotion of local tourism, emphasizes all necessary support for social tourism (Van der Steina et al, 2019b).…”

“…In Estonia, data from mobile operators are used to measure the concentration and flows of tourists in the country. The Central Statistical Office of Latvia has begun to collect and analyse mobile data statistics (Van der Steina et al, 2019a). Accordingly, planning and management is important because smart tourism is highly dependent on the integrated software platform supported by technology, various terminals that provide respective services to tourists and the tourism management platform (Sun et al, 2022).…”

“…Hence it is important to introduce the systems proposed and assess them with reference to a large number of users in order to obtain certain results about the effectiveness of such systems and the challenges that arise in practice (Kontogianni and Alepis, 2020). It is also pointed out that to date, many tourism industry decisions at the company, municipality, regional and national levels have been made based on intuition and not on research findings (Van der Steina et al, 2019b).…”

“…In Latvia, the needs and perceptions of the senior segment regarding smart tourism have not been sufficiently researched (Van der Steina et al, 2019a). The trend in new technologies show that it is essential to foster smart solutions to the development of tourism and destinations, the digitalization of tourism companies and the creation of tourism statistics (Rozite et al, 2020).…”