Athena na cestách

Since June of this year, a new project for support of the accessible tourism in the Czech Republic has launched its activities. It is called ATHENA na cestách/ATHENA. The project deals with development of human resources and employment in the Czech Republic and increasing awareness of barrier-free travelling, applying experience and inspiration from EU countries.

Even though some measures in this sphere have already been taken in the Czech Republic, the topic of accessible tourism deserves more attention. Many European countries consider barrier-free tourism highly promising, namely from the point of view of creating sustainable working positions, supporting the social integration and collaboration of the public and private sector. The Czech Republic still lacks a sufficient and quality offer of services that would enable the disabled, seniors, and parents with small children and other tourists with reduced mobility and orientation to take part in tourism according to their specific needs. According to Mrs. Jarmila Šagátová, the chief project manager of ATHENA, the public sector has so far shown a very limited interest in accessible tourism, and there is a lack of the coordination of individual activities in this area. The awareness of institutions as well as the general public is similarly insufficient.
The main objective of the project ATHENA, that is financed by the European Social Fund through the Operational programme Human Resources and Employment, is to remove the so-called soft barriers. Its activities focus mostly on increasing the awareness and understanding of this topic by employers in the tourist industry, bodies of state administration, educational institutions as well as the actual disabled persons, non-governmental organizations uniting or employing such clients, and the general public. “The main objectives of the project are to introduce accessible tourism to them as an area with high potential for the development of employment and integration of persons disadvantaged at the labour market. We would like to motivate the institutions to promote this kind of tourism in their practice, and thus creating a thematic network of cooperation,” says Mrs Šagátová describing the purposes of the project that is supposed to last until May 2011. The project takes place mostly in the Moravian-Silesian Region, the Hradec Kralove Region, the South Bohemian Region and in Prague.

After the end of the project, a manual on accessible tourism, a set of methods for creating information systems for the area of accessible tourism in the Czech Republic, an electronic library collecting information about accessible tourism in the EU countries or a set of good European examples of accessible tourism shall be available to all users. For the purposes of creating such products, the project organizers plan to use the cooperation with their international partner - ENAT (European Network for Accessible Tourism) that gives patronage over various public as well as private subjects whose objective is to make travelling accessible to all, i.e. also to persons with specific needs. The project ATHENA is managed by KAZUIST, spol. s.r.o. (Trinec) in cooperation with the civil association OS TRIANON (Cesky Tesin), TRIANON-ČECHY, o.s., (Vimperk) and the Czech National Disability Council (Prague).

The project ATHENA na cestách / ATHENA will be introduced at the Medical Fair in Brno on Friday 23 October 2009 in conference hall D of the Congress Centre at 10 a.m. All who are interested in the topic of accessible tourism, both from the public and the private sector, are kindly invited to the workshop of Accessible travelling in practice.

Ing. Jarmila Šagátová, project manager 
Phone No.: 558 335 479, e-mail: kazuist@kazuist.cz