Getting started

Ariane Goerke, young German entrepreneur discovering innovative Slovenian tourism

I've had some time now to reflect on the few weeks I've spent here and to clearly define my goals for the upcoming months.

Meanwhile it has been great weather for Ljubljana ;-). I remember being here last year during the same time and it was raining cats and dogs! I couldn't get my shoes dry for over a week and got a cold just right after I arrived. A Slovenian friend told me that Ljubljana has even more rain in average per year than London. Unbelievable. Anyway, this year it's a whole different story. With almost 30 degrees Celsius by the end of September it is said to be the hottest summer in 100 years. Well, it just started to rain today....

Last week I joined Tina to the opening of a new tourist agency here in Ljubljana called PREMIKI (which means movements). It's a further development of Turag4all and it's all about accessible tourism. They focus on target groups with special needs such as disabled people, old people or pregnant woman. It is a really interesting concept, I think, and I wish Dolores will have a fruitfull business! We'll see if there is a possibility for cooperation in the future.

Yesterday I met Sebastjan Rosa, the Slovenian coordinator, and we presented the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneur Programme together with a young entrepreneur from Spain at Studentska Arena, the biggest event for students in Ljubljana. That is where the photo of this post was taken :-).

I was thinking about how to make the best out of my stay here. Tina posted the news about my stay on the BTPS website and I got many emails from tourism providers. YEAH!

I already got in contact with Anja from Notranjska Ecological Center and we agreed to do a little project together. I will visit her and the ECO Center in the beginning of November and we want to try to create something together, which is great and exactly what I was looking for. Of course, such things take time - so I decided to do a longer project with her lasting until January.

You probably won't believe it, but I seriously did some research at the library of the Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. There you get access to search engines for academic journals and I found loads of papers in English on Slovenian tourism. 

So, my mission is to find and/or create innovative and authentically tourism products with the help of any tourism player who is interested to collaborate with me. Hereby I would be happy to help and promote rather unknown places in Slovenia, you know, everything except the top destinations >Postojna Cave, Bled and Ljubljana<.

It's getting better and better!

Stay tuned about my journey around GREEN sLOVEnia!

Lep pozdrav,

Ariane