CAMPUS 2026

Arrival and Welcome

A relaxed welcome at Brewery Restaurant Koulu with drinks and nibbles. You can order food at the venue if you would like more.

Welcome to CAMPUS

Nick HallFounder & CEO, Digital Tourism Think Tank

Welcome from the Host Region

Kristiina KukkohoviCEO, Visit Turku Archipelago

A Working Harbour: Why CAMPUS Begins at the Boat Yard

Teemu ArtukkaHead of Restaurant Operations, Ruissalo Boat Yard

No Future is Inevitable: Scenario Planning that Changes the Outcome

No future is inevitable. Destinations face pressures they cannot fully predict, and strategic foresight gives them a way to prepare for several futures at once instead of betting everything on one. This keynote shows how scenario planning changes the decisions a destination makes today, and why the courage to act on the future matters most when budgets are tight.

Foresight in Practice: Research and Self-Built Tools

Foresight earns its place when it becomes a daily tool. This panel sets the research view alongside the applied one: tourism futures from the University of Eastern Finland, the self-built AI tools running at Visit Hungary, from an eight-indicator sustainability tracker to a model forecasting algae risk on Lake Balaton, and Ljubljana's work on forecasting demand. The discussion looks at how destinations move from foresight as an idea to foresight in everyday use, and where the bottleneck shifts from budget to imagination.

Wonderful KPIs: Who Gets to Define Tourism Success?

Arrivals and revenue say little about whether tourism is making a place better to live in. Wonderful KPIs, the open-source methodology built by Cuidadores de Destinos, starts from a different question: who gets to define what tourism success means, and what changes when residents and the territory help decide. Each destination adopts at least one metric that reflects what actually matters locally, from the soundscape of a place, to the count of a particular bird species recorded by schoolchildren as citizen science, to whether women feel safe walking alone at night. Once conceptual and hard to track, these are now within reach as technology and local partners make the data available. The session makes the case for redefining success on local terms, and for bringing the people usually left out of that decision to the table.

Why Collaborative Design Matters: Two Perspectives on Collectively Shaped Strategies

A destination's direction holds when it is shaped with the people and interests that have to live with it. Dolomiti Paganella and Val di Sole sit close together in Trentino, yet each has taken deliberate steps to decide what kind of destination it wants to be, where it creates value, which visitors it wants and how it meets the pressures in front of it. That work runs across destination development, product, community, biodiversity and seasonality, shaped collectively through bold choices and the harder task of building stakeholder and political backing. Luca D'Angelo (VisitPaganella) and Fabio Sacco (Azienda per il Turismo Val di Sole) reflect on what they have learned and what those choices mean for the years ahead.

A Scent for Saaristo

A place can be defined through what naturally grows and lives there. Visit Turku Archipelago and the Finnish scent house Hetkinen built a scent to represent Saaristo, the archipelago, from locally sourced ingredients. This joint session tells the story of that collaboration and what it stands for, the essence of a destination captured through its own environment and the value of working with local makers.

Circular Tourism: From Theory to Practice

Circular tourism becomes real when its principles move into everyday operations. The levers that matter most in practice run from repair and regional sourcing to circular procurement and renovating buildings instead of replacing them, and the greatest leverage comes from collaboration across the tourism value chain over any single business acting alone.

Sauna, Salvage and Circular Building

A sauna assembled from salvaged and reclaimed materials is circular building made tangible. The Båthus sauna at Ruissalo was designed and built from what was already to hand and this fireside walks through how it was made and what reuse and local resourcefulness look like in practice.

Recap and Frame the Day

Nature-Based Education and the Regenerative Destination

Veronika BlachHead of Environmental Programmes, TUI Care Foundation

Regenerative tourism asks a destination to leave its place and people better than it found them, and that depends on the next generation who will inherit it. At the TUI Care Foundation, nature-based education is used to build environmental knowledge and green-job pathways for young people in destinations worldwide. Drawing on the Foundation's projects, from the Junior Academy to community Eco Champions, this session shows how education becomes a regenerative tool, one that keeps young people connected to their home destinations and strengthens the host community value a destination relies on.

Net Zero at Scale: From Pledge to Plan

Net zero has moved from pledge to operational plan, and the hard part is turning a commitment into change across a whole destination, where the difficult choices sit and how progress gets measured.

Climate Action Across the Destination: Hotel, City, Sea and Slope

Climate action looks different depending on where you stand in a destination. This panel brings four operators who each meet it from a different front: a hotel group cutting its footprint at Scandic, a city working towards carbon neutrality at Turku, a ferry operator decarbonising sea travel at Viking Line and a mountain resort carrying the real cost of adaptation at Ruka and Pyhä. Between them, they show what climate mitigation actually demands on the ground and what it costs, and where a hotel, a city, a ship and a ski resort can learn from one another.

Biodiversity and the Finnish Framework for Regenerative Tourism

This session will explore biodiversity, leadership and resilience in national sustainability programmes.

Closed for Maintenance: The Regenerative Model Behind the Headlines

Regenerative action does not come from a strategy document. It comes from a project that implements it. Since 2019 Visit Faroe Islands has closed parts of the destination to tourists and opened them to volunteers, running an annual application round where municipalities, tourist offices and farmers put forward maintenance projects with genuine tourism relevance, of which eight to ten are selected and delivered each year. The global media coverage is only part of the story. The more interesting part is what the model does as a destination management tool, mobilising people into shared projects and producing tangible improvement on the ground year after year. This session goes behind the scenes of how it works, what it has changed in the Faroe Islands and why a model built on giving something back has proved durable.

CopenPay to DestinationPay: Rewarding Visitors for Doing Good

A destination can reward visitors for making greener choices and change the relationship between the two as it does so. CopenPay began as a Copenhagen pilot trading good behaviour for access and experiences, and this session traces how it is growing into something other destinations can adopt, what worked, what surprised the team and what a reward model does to how visitors behave.

Measuring What Matters: From Pledge to Operational Impact

How do destinations move from committing to visitor flow management to actually reporting measurable reductions? Katrin Erben walks through the operational reality — what measurement looks like, which data tools make the difference, and how to build the internal case that matters to hotel owners and council members.

Higher Value, Steadier Demand: Niche Tourism Beyond the Peak

Higher-value, niche tourism builds a steadier model than chasing volume. Demand that leans on dark sky experiences and small-group travel is less exposed to the swings of season and region, and it tends to bring visitors who value what a place actually offers. Drawing on work across Greenland and the North West Denmark coast, this fireside looks at how a destination shifts towards quality and resilience.