How It All Began

Slow Trips started with a friendly get-together in Hartberg, Eastern Styria in January 2019

The LEADER TNC project “CultTrips 2.0 European Slow Travel Experiences” — actually, that’s a bit of a mouthful, let’s just stick with “Slow Trips” from now on. So, what you know as Slow Trips started at a small event in 2019.

From 13–15 January, representatives from nine different European regions met in Hartberg (Eastern Styria, Austria) to talk about possible innovations in tourism and internationalisation. The official marketing name of the project was defined as “Slow Trips — Experience People and Culture”.

The philosophy behind the project is to give travellers the opportunity to meet the locals of each region and experience their everyday culture. The enjoyment of local products is another important aspect because food and drink are fantastic ways of experiencing local culture. Also, we all need to eat and drink, so we might as well do it well.

To present an example, members from the LEADER organisation Zeitkultur and the Eastern Styrian Tourist Association (Oststeiermark Tourismus) introduced their first Slow Trips Experience. The other project partners even got to experience it first-hand.

In the pictures below, you see the international project team enjoying the very first prototype of a Slow Trips Experience. They visited the 500-year-old Posch mill in Hartberg, where they were taught how to grind their own flour and learned about the life of a miller in Eastern Styria. A night watchman’s tour through the city centre of Hartberg followed. Meanwhile, some competitive mindsets may have emerged during a textile printing workshop in nearby Pöllauberg.