Abstract

In the year 2010 around 493.000 tourists visited Iceland. In the year 2017 the number of guests jumped over 2,5 millions. At the same time outdoors recreation by Icelanders have exploded. This has caused quite some challenging assignments since the infrastructure in Iceland is not ready to deal with all those tourists. To deal with increasing accidents The Icelandic Associtaion for search and rescue founded the project Safetravel in 2010. The aim was to influence tourists and outdoor people to change their behaviour, to inform them about conditions and the right behaviour and in that way to decrease incidents. In the lecture we wil go over how the projects has grown with the aim to cooperate with the tourism industry and clubs working in outdoors in Iceland. The importance of cooperations to succed will be underlined and some examples shown. Also some examples of projects over the years will be shown, some of them quite uniqe in the world. The lecture is by our opinion a very good example of case study where conference guests will see the important of working with different stakeholders with the aim to decrease accidents. The exploding in tourists to Iceland is uniqe in tourism all over the world and the challenging assignments and how was dealt with them is something to learn from. The lecturer, Jónas Guðmundsson has been the project manager of Safetravel since the beginning. He has a BA degree in Rural Torism. He has over 30 years experience working with his rescue team and has for over 20 years experience as a guide and ranger in the National Parks in Iceland. He is a teacher at the Icelandic Guiding school and have been teaching safety in the tourism industry for years.