Beyond the Souvenir Is Live — And We Need You to Shape What Comes Next
Today, Beyond the Souvenir goes live. Not as a finished product, but as an open invitation — to educators, practitioners, companies, governments, and organisations who believe that tourism can be a force for genuine good in the world.
This is not just a website launch. It is the beginning of a network.
A Network Built Across Four Continents
Beyond the Souvenir connects four higher education hubs (VIVES University of Applied Sciences in Belgium, Universidad de Cuenca in Ecuador, Mountains of the Moon University and Makerere University Business Schoool in Uganda, and Quy Nhon University in Vietnam) under a shared mission: to transform how tourism and hospitality professionals are educated, and to ensure that education stays grounded in the realities of the field.
The project is backed by VLIRUOS, the Flemish Interuniversity Council, which funds international development programmes between Belgian universities and partners in the Global South. That backing gives the network both the credibility and the structure to go beyond good intentions.
But a network is only as strong as the people who make it real.
Why Your Expertise Belongs Here
Curriculum does not improve in lecture halls alone. The future of sustainable tourism education depends on a direct, ongoing relationship between academic institutions and the organisations actually working on the ground: the tour operators building community-based itineraries, the NGOs protecting coastal ecosystems, the municipal governments trying to balance visitor demand with local quality of life.
As a stakeholder in this network, you are not a sponsor or a donor. You are a co-architect. Your field experience shapes what students learn, what challenges get researched, and what solutions get tested.
The gap between what tourism graduates know and what the industry needs is well documented. This project exists to close it — together.
Join Us on 11 May in Brugge
The first stakeholder event of Beyond the Souvenir takes place on 11 May 2026 at VIVES University of Applied Sciences in Brugge, Belgium.
The programme includes keynote presentations from the project’s academic and field partners, followed by a networking reception where you can meet the people behind the network and explore what collaboration might look like for your organisation.
This is the first live gathering of a community that will grow across four continents. The conversations that begin on 11 May will help define the direction of the network for years to come.
We hope to see you there.
Register via our Events section.
Photo by Sergei Akulich on Unsplash.