Among many events for experience-exchange and capacity-building, it is important to highlight the Joint Ranger Training that took place in 2010. The aim was to provide training for rangers, guides and informationstaff to better deal with international visitors and to be able to explain and demonstrate the value of transnational cooperation in nature protection. The training consisted of two eight-day courses; the first was an English course, with many chances to also train didactic and rhetoric skills. The second was on International Nature Protection, consisting of an interactive classroom unit about different organisations, the political level, didactic tools and a tour along several Danube Protected Areas in different countries. Both courses were held twice, once in Austria along the Upper and Middle Danubeand once in Romania along the Lower Danube.
Three main marketing activities were implemented. The Network’s website now contains a database of tourism opportunities in the protected areas, with additional information on accommodations and transport in the areas. You can search for the tourism opportunities here. Additionally, maps were created that can be downloaded for more information on the region and the protected areas, containing all the information necessary for tourists. The link is www.danubemap.eu. These two different tools serve as information portals for individual travellers.
The tourism brochure describes briefly the results of the Tourism Strategy and offers descriptions of the tourism opportunities in all Protected Areas of the network. The brochure should provide information about nature tourism along the Danube for individual travellers as well as for the tourism industry, and was first distributed at the tourism conference in November 2011.
Regarding product development, several Protected Areas developed offers for boat and/or bike tourism. The new tours provided by Duna-Ipoly National Park and Persina Nature Park were also tested by all the other partners, thus providing valuable feedback to the organisers.
