Ms. Esencan Teribasoglu, Director of Destination, UNWTO, Interviewed by the Media

It is a very good initiative I think because it normally addresses a regional cooperation platform. On this platform the countries, the destinations, national and local level, and mostly of course because it is based on the cities. They can collaborate on many, many issues to improve sustainable tourism. First of all they must share a vision, a long term vision. They must share this vision while they are competing. And we call this “coopetition” because they compete, because they are different destinations. At the same time they cooperate. So we call this “coopetition.” This is a very useful platform to share a long-term vision for sustainable tourism development which has a very, very positive impact on the local communities, social impact, economic impact, culture impact and so on. So, I think it is a very useful initiative. Altogether you can share this vision. Altogether you can address the challenges because there are many challenges going on. You have to face these challenges and probably you have to mitigate the negative impact of tourism altogether this is one thing. Because tourism is very positive but sometimes if you do not have a sustainable policy then you may even end up with negative impact. And you can do research altogether. Because you can collect data, you can pool together your resources. Because it is not very easy to specialize on research with limited resources. It is very good you can pool in pool together your resources to improve your research methodology which will guide you the future of tourism in this region, so this is very important. And the other is you improve and you share knowledge, and you improve professionalism, you have capacity to build program and so on. Of course The most important thing is it is a common ground for promotion so you can do common products although the products may differ at different destinations in this route. You can altogether make your promoting and marketing, also this is efficient in terms of budgetary implications and also this has a bigger impact in the marketplace.