ŠIPK 4

Development of a cultural information platform to provide information on cultural events and heritage sites

Cultural tourism is the most important area of tourism, accounting for around 40% of total tourism in Europe. This segment of tourists is one of the most desirable, as they are better consumers, stay longer in the destination and have a positive attitude towards other local offerings.

In Slovenia, the situation is different. The only survey conducted by Ljubljana Tourism in this area shows that only 3% of tourists chose culture as a motive for coming to Ljubljana. This situation is the result of unsystematic work in this segment of tourism, a lack of quality and interesting cultural and tourist offer, ineffective promotion at local and international level and inadequate communication with consumers of cultural and artistic content.

The Imago Sloveniae Foundation The Image of Slovenia (Imago) is a non-governmental organisation that has been successfully working for 30 years in the field of revitalisation of cultural heritage buildings and development of cultural tourism in Ljubljana and other places in Slovenia. Concerts organised by Imago take place in the city’s squares with fountains, atriums, sacral buildings and other attractive historical parts of the city. Over the past 30 years, Imago has developed a number of internationally renowned cultural tourism projects, including the Summer in Old Ljubljana and Nights in Old Ljubljana festivals. Both festivals have a great potential for further development, and promotion and communication with potential visitors to the events is an important factor in this. It is the latter that we aim to improve with the proposed project.

The Kultura.info project will develop an online platform, which will be upgraded with a smartphone app. The platform will provide access to information on cultural events and event locations in Ljubljana’s city centre (including presentations of concert locations and cultural and historical attractions), display on a map and recommend content according to visitors’ “tastes”. The platform will initially provide all this information in Slovenian and English.