OPEN DIALOGUE ARENA – CONFERENCE ON YOUTH TOURISM – OPENS YOUTH

By presenting the future tour guides of Novi Sad for young tourists, Conference on Youth Tourism was opened within OPENS Youth Fair.

The idea of OPENS was to open an arena within the 7 th Regional Youth Tourism Fair OPENS Youth Fair in which the tourist offer of the city would be openly talked about, especially when talking about youth tourism.

“The programs which OPENS has already implemented will bring half a million young people from the whole Europe to this city next year. At the same time, we should remind ourselves that a young tourist has completely different needs, and we think that now is the time to ask the question whether Novi Sad is ready for what is coming next year when we will be European Youth Capital and what it is that we can fix”, Aleksandra Ilijin, OPENS Program Coordinator explains.

Therefore, the Conference, intended primarily for the stakeholders in the field of tourism, presented two panels – digital marketing and trends in youth tourism.

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“In Serbia, young people have become the holders of tourism and tourist offer, because they are the ones with most energy and strength and maybe the least experience to take the bull by the horns with everything that the role of an entrepreneur brings. From what we can see in Serbian tourism now, young people are the initiators of all new ideas, I think that can be felt in the tourist offer and it is good that that is the case”, Marko Ristovski, one of the panellists and the owner of eco-hostel from Užice explains.

What is a general conclusion of the conference is that the increase of participation of young people is very important, especially when it comes to the tourism image of the city. This is why the conference was the place for the professional jury to select the best guide on Novi Sad for young people, created by young citizens of Novi Sad within the “OPENS Challenge” competition. The winning team is ESN team, with Nađa Jovičin, Nikolina Đurić, Maksim Karanović and Luka Papić.