The BEST Project

The BEST project - B7 Exchange on Sustainable Tourism - is a joint project between the seven largest islands in the Baltic Sea. The B7 islands are Bornholm - Denmark, Gotland - Sweden, Hiiumaa - Estonia, Saaremaa - Estonia, Rügen - Germany, Åland - Finland and Öland - Sweden. Gotland is the Lead Partner with its headoffice based in Visby.
The BEST project was initiated as a result of the Common Strategy for the B7 islands, which was adopted in Visby in May 1996. The main objective is to promote Sustainable Tourism in the islands. Sub-aims are:
To develop an inter-island cooperation network to promote the development of sustainable tourism.
To establish common systems for codes of conduct, benchmarking an quality control.
To adopt and publish a Green Paper.
To initiate at least three development projects.
To make a B7 contribution to the VASAB and Baltic Agenda 21 processes.
Key words for the project activities are:
DEFINITION - POSITIONING -APPEARANCE - NETWORKING

The project has a total budget of 360.000 Euro and a duration of 21 months. In order to take advantage of synergy effects formal agreements about exchange of information have been made with three similar Interreg projects:
ARCIBAL Finland, Sweden and Denmark.
BTC Baltic Sea Tourism Commision, Sweden.
Bothnian Arc Sweden and Finland.
Associated project partners are:
Bornholms Research Centre, Nexø, Denmark.
Estonian ECO-Tourism Assiciation, Pärnu, Estonia.
Gotland University College, Visby, Sweden.
Societé D'Eco-Aménagement, Montpellier, France.
Kalmar University College, Kalmar, Sweden.

The project is supported by the European Union under the Interreg IIC Programme.