Those who want to make their destination sustainable and achieve optimal regional value creation must position themselves on the market through the quality of their offering. The challenge for the DMOs is to stimulate the quality-oriented development of a diverse range of offerings.

One main starting point for this is the targeted professionalisation of tourism service providers and DMO staff through appropriate qualification offerings (capacity building). The actors must be able to develop marketable offerings so that they can contribute to regional value creation. The complexity of the tourism-related offerings, and the wide range of service providers participating in their creation, make it essential to systematically develop and ensure quality.

Based on training needs assessment for the DMOs in Imereti and Kakheti, training and coaching programme were developed covering all major themes that should enable the DMOs to function and perform activities supporting the tourism strategy and DMO’s action plan.

Trainings covered all main themes:

• DMO, objective, organisation, functioning and work programme
• Branding and marketing of tourism
• Tourism trends, sustainable and eco-tourism
• Marketing planning and implementation
• Communication and PR
• Tourism product development, events and festival organisation
• Customer relations, tourist surveys and tourist information centers

Capacity building included also on the job coaching where practical work was done and experts' guidance and support was given to:

• Preparation to participation on tourism fairs and exhibitions
• Preparation of tourism brochures, Tour Operators’ manuals, tourism leaflets
• Preparation of communication tools: Destination fact sheets, Press releases and Newsletters
• Development of thematic tourist tours in destination
• Presenting and discussing benchmark destinations