3COMMUNITIES AS A PART OF SUSTAINABLE RURAL TOURISM – SUCCESS FACTOR OR INEVITABLE BURDEN?

FOREWORD

Comcot (Competitive Community Tourism) was an international development project that brought together Estonian and Finnish tourism specialists, developers and entre-preneurs along with a team of development experts from the UK.The project was initiated to help communities’ better exploit the expanding Central Baltic tourism sector. While in many Finnish and Estonian rural areas tourism has developed to be a main income source, with this comes the need for new sustainable, high quality market orientated products, which are linked together locally, regionally and internationally.

The Comcot project developed innovative and sustainable community based tour-ism with high local ownership. Expanding the opportunities for local level actors to de- velop competitive tourism by combining cross-border cooperation networks with joint community work at the local level. By creating new strategic thinking and innovative planning by communities and improved business skills, the project developed more competitive businesses and targeted products and services for existing and new clients  while also helping entrepreneurs to improve their effectiveness to develop new innova-tive products. The project lead partner was the Estonian University of Life Sciences (project website http://pk.emu.ee/en/comcot).