📍 Riga, Latvia | 6–8 May 2025
Earlier this month, I represented Ocean Nomads at the Cross-Re-Tour workshop in Riga a 3-day in-person gathering focused on the twin transition in tourism: digital and green. The event brought together 87 selected projects and 12 national partner organisations from across Europe.
Cross-Re-Tour is a European Union–funded initiative supporting small-scale tourism innovation experiments. Each project receives funding over a 14-months period to develop and test new approaches in sustainable and digital tourism.
Why Ocean Nomads Was Selected
Ocean Nomads positions itself as an innovative digital hub connecting communities around low-impact sailing expeditions designed to foster personal transformation, environmental awareness, and healthy lifestyles. The project focuses on testing a scalable digital platform to coordinate decentralized, peer-to-peer sailing journeys that operate without fixed infrastructure, either with member owned vessels, partner organizations or charters.
Over the grant period, Ocean Nomads will deliver:
- An improved digital hub to facilitate trip planning, community engagement, and knowledge sharing
- Tools and workshops to support collaborative and healthy travel experiences both in person and online
- A tested model for nature-immersive, low-impact sailing-based tourism that encourages sustainable behavior and lasting community connections
We’re not building the next booking app or hotel chain; instead, we’re demonstrating that travel can be healthy, human-scale, and off-grid, where a sailboat can be both home and classroom, and where community thrives long after time at sea. This approach aligns closely with Cross-Re-Tour’s objectives by using digital innovation to support green and socially conscious tourism.
Inside the Riga Workshop
Over the course of the event, we participated in workshops on innovation in tourism that covered design thinking, client and staff nudging, and behavior-change tools. We also engaged in networking sessions with other project leads and EU partners, had informal conversations that sparked connections and future collaborations, and attended a general debrief on navigating EU grant mechanisms, which, while complex, proved manageable.
There was a lot of interest in gamification and nudging tools — systems that reward eco-conscious actions or help track behavior in meaningful ways. It’s a complex space, but some ideas could help us deepen impact during Ocean Nomads expeditions and online. We’re taking what’s useful, leaving what’s not.
An expert in tourism gave a presentation on Nudging Sustainability for Tourism Businesses and you can find their slides here.
I also recorded a short interview with a Portuguese project partner, coming soon.
The setup was quite formal: hotel, restaurant dinners, conference rooms, but the value was in the people, their projects and the institutions represented. I left with new ideas, potential collaborations, and a clearer picture of how ON fits into this bigger picture.
On the last day I went bog shoeing and at an art installation in the forest, during one of the field trips organized, which was quite cool! Bog shoes are basically snow shoes for this very unique wet ecosystem, It snowed and then strong sunshine came back, shifty weather!
Ocean-Focused Projects We Met
It was great to meet others working on maritime and water-based innovation. A few highlights:
- Sailing Point (Slovenia) – Sailing Events PRO – Creating Sustainable Sport Events: Leveraging digital tools to measure waste, water use, and food impact at global regattas—setting new sustainability standards in sailing
- Maristra (Slovenia) – Take Your Butt With You: Tackling coastal plastic pollution via smart education on cigarette butts, using gamified apps and community action to boost eco-conscious tourism.
- Kiel Marinas (Germany) – Sustainable Marina Energy Integration: Leisure boats feed unused solar power into marina grids, making energy use more sustainable and tapping into a floating solar network.
- EcoMarine Malta (Malta) – BLUE TIDE: A digital platform to promote sustainable marine ecotourism through interactive, educational, and gamified content.
- New Dimension Scuba (Malta – Dive into a greener future: Promoting reusable water bottles to reduce single-use plastics and dive truck emissions, lessening the environmental impact of the diving community.
- Boat Bike Tours (Netherlands) – Sustainable fuel & emissions tracking for net zero voyages: A Net Zero Cloud for bike & barge holidays, visualizing CO2 emissions, fuel and real time energy monitoring, shore power usage & onboard menu choices.
- CAP A MAR (Spain) – Fostering Innovative Sustainable Heritage through a New Engagement in Tourism: Promote sustainable marine culture and fishing through interactive tools to educate visitors on responsible consumption and environmental protection.
Some other operators blend maritime offers into broader sustainable tourism concepts, though not as their main focus.
Next Stop: Malta (by Sail?)
The next in-person Cross-Re-Tour gathering is expected in the second half of April 2026 in Malta at the end of the grant. We’re exploring the possibility of sailing there from Sicily bringing other delegates, turning the travel into part of the project experience.
The draft idea is to charter a boat in southern Sicily, which is accessible by train, then sail across 50 to 100 nautical miles to Malta, live onboard during the event, and finally sail back after approximately one week.
A draft list of interested crew is already in progress, many other awarded companies see value in using alternatives to flying and are excited to shape together with ON another way of attending these events: less elegant dinners and more hands on deck.
Final Thoughts
Cross-Re-Tour gives us a rare window into EU-funded tourism innovation, and a seat at the table to shape it. Our strength lies in offering something different: a tested, lived model of community-powered, nature-connected travel.
Being at this event confirmed that we have a role to play by staying true to what brought us here at Ocean Nomads, and sharing it with others who want a different kind of travel and lifestyle.
More to come,
Ocean Nomads Ambassador
