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Self-assessment Tool

This questionnaire is part of the interactive checklist which was developed in WP3 Ecotourism planning. The purpose of the questionnaire is to enable users to carry out a self-assessment of their region or case study, to identify strengths and weaknesses and to direct them to the relevant parts of the guidelines.

Rationale

A key element of work package 3 “Ecotourism planning” was the development of “Guidelines for Sustainable Bicycle Tourism” (Aschauer et al., 2021). The aim of the guidelines was to facilitate the development of regional strategies and planning processes. The guidelines utilize synergies between sustainable multimodal mobility planning, including cycling infrastructure, and cyclist ecotourism related services and ecotourism development (e.g. destination management, marketing, product development) along the EuroVelo routes. The guidelines for sustainable bicycle tourism provide a comprehensive basis for planning and improving all relevant mobility-related infrastructure and services.

In the original plan a simple checklist should be part of the guidelines. During the development of the project EcoVeloTour it became clear that a static checklist would not be suitable to cope with the complexities of planning for sustainable bicycle tourism. Hence an interactive self-assessment tool was developed on the basis of the guidelines. A mock-up of the tool in MS Excel was tested in transnational learning interactions, with students of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna and in a workshop with stakeholders from the Austrian micro-region Schwarzatal. During the project EcoVeloTour the tool was also used as an instrument to collect feedback from project partners and external stakeholders. The final version of the tool is part of the EcoVeloTour e-learning platform.

The interactive tool is organised along the following seven chapters of the guidelines:

  1. Bicycle based eco-tourism
  2. Infrastructure for high-level bicycle tourism
  3. Transport services and intermodality
  4. Bicycle rental schemes
  5. Accommodation and gastronomy
  6. Information, communication and marketing
  7. Measuring bicycle based eco-tourism

The main aim of the tool is to support stakeholders in the early strategic phases of the development of strategies and projects. The tool supports the users by asking concrete, practical and detailed questions, e.g.: How easily can tourists travel to your region in an eco-friendly way? How do you assess the maintenance of the bike routes? Is there enough information about bike rental services? Help texts direct users to specific sections of the guidelines if they are in need of support. Nevertheless, this strategic tool is not intended to be a substitute for detailed expert planning and assessment.

Basic structure of the tool

The Excel based tool functions without using macros. The tool consists of 56 individual spreadsheets. Three of the spreadsheet deal with general information. Seven spreadsheets are used for scoring the chapter wise sub-questions by the users. Seven spreadsheets are used for the definition of the weights of the different sub-questions asked in each chapter. The remaining 39 spreadsheets contain help text for individual sub-questions and topics.

The navigation between the spreadsheets is organised via links. E.g. “→“ forward to the next sheet or ← Back to interface back to the sheet “Interface”.

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