Tourism

FuTurisme is a programme for the creation of innovative, sustainable companies in the field of tourism, promoted by Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, ACAVe and the Barcelona Hotel Association.

The 2023 FuTurisme Award for the most innovative idea has gone to BEDER, a start-up that uses immersive audiovisual experiences to make reservations in the area of leisure and tourism, while the Award for achieving SDG-Agenda 2030 gone to ITINERER, a personalised-guide service offering routes in European cities using artificial intelligence techniques and natural language processing (NLP).

Each of these companies has been awarded €10,000, so they can continue to grow and consolidate their projects, along with six months of personalised mentoring from Barcelona Activa. ITINERER will also be awarded a year’s registration and quota with ACAVe, if the winning project is constituted as a travel agency.

Xavier Marcé, the Councillor for Tourism and Creative Industries, congratulated all the participants in the programme “for your entrepreneurial spirit, which is so necessary at times like these”, and affirmed that “with your projects, you are contributing to the transformation of what constitutes the visitor economy, and you are helping to connect the culture of the place with the people who visit it, exploring the opportunities offered by digitalisation”.

This is the sixth edition of these awards, part of the programme supporting the creation of responsible, innovative companies in the field of tourism, promoted by Barcelona Activa – Barcelona City Council, Barcelona Provincial Council, the Corporate Association of Specialised Travel Agencies (ACAVe) and the Barcelona Hotel Association.

Aimed at entrepreneurs who want to set up their activities in Barcelona city or province, the FuTurisme Programme is designed to create responsible, innovative, sustainable companies with a vision of the future that responds to the new needs of the tourism sector in the city or province.

Improving the tourism experience

Among the projects presented this year, there were also two other finalists: TALLERES A VELA, a blue economy project that uses the sea as a source of creativity for tourism; and NIUBBO, a digital tool for personalising travel circuits, which also received mentoring and support during their participation in the entrepreneurial programme.

The jury that decided on the 2023 winning projects was made up of: Advanced Leisure Services, Winenium, ACAVe, IQS School of Management, CETT, James & Rita, Oasis Hunters, Diskover.cat, CatExperience, the Barcelona Hotel Association, Julià Tours, Vive4all, Vivential Value, Barcelona Provincial Council, Clúster TIC Turisme, Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa.