📍 Riga, Latvia | 6 to 8 May 2025
Earlier this month, I represented Ocean Nomads at the Cross-Re-Tour workshop in Riga, a three-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-month period to develop and test new approaches in sustainable and digital tourism.
Why Ocean Nomads Was Selected
Ocean Nomads positions itself as a digital hub connecting communities around low-impact sailing expeditions designed to foster personal growth, environmental awareness, and a healthier lifestyle. The project tests a community-led platform that coordinates decentralised, peer-to-peer sailing trips operating without fixed infrastructure: on member-owned vessels, through partner organisations, or via 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 behaviour and lasting community connections
We are not building the next booking app or hotel chain. We are showing that travel can be healthy, human-scale, and off-grid, where a sailboat can be both home and classroom, and where community keeps going long after the time at sea. This approach fits closely with Cross-Re-Tour’s objectives of using digital innovation to support green and socially conscious tourism.
Inside the Riga Workshop
Over the course of the event, we joined workshops on innovation in tourism covering design thinking, client and staff nudging, and behaviour-change tools. We took part 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 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 behaviour in meaningful ways. It is a complex space, but some ideas could help us deepen impact during Ocean Nomads expeditions and online. We are taking what is useful and leaving the rest.
An expert in tourism gave a presentation on Nudging Sustainability for Tourism Businesses and the slides are here.
I also recorded a short interview with a Portuguese project partner. More on that soon.
The setup was quite formal: hotel, restaurant dinners, conference rooms. 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 Ocean Nomads fits into this bigger picture.
On the last day I went bog shoeing and visited an art installation in the forest, during one of the organised field trips. Bog shoes are basically snow shoes for this very unique wet ecosystem. It snowed, 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: using 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 through 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 connecting to 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, reducing the environmental impact of the diving community.
- Boat Bike Tours (Netherlands), sustainable fuel and emissions tracking for net-zero voyages: a Net Zero Cloud for bike and barge holidays, visualising CO2 emissions, fuel and real-time energy monitoring, shore power usage, and onboard menu choices.
- Cap a Mar (Spain), fostering innovative sustainable heritage through a new engagement in tourism: promoting sustainable marine culture and fishing through interactive tools that 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.
COMING SOON: EU-FUNDED UPGRADES TO THE OCEAN NOMADS PLATFORM
Ocean Nomads has been selected as a beneficiary of the Cross-Re-Tour Open Innovation Programme, supported by the European Union. This funding helps us scale digital tools and sustainable features that empower conscious sea travel and community impact. It is part of a wider initiative to support small-scale tourism innovation experiments across Europe, driving environmental and digital transformation in the sector.
✨ Interactive Map 2.0
Location-based knowledge and ride-sharing for low-impact sea travel. Discover Ocean Nomads basecamps, eco-projects, tips, and routes.
✨ Impact Tracker
Track wind-powered miles, log eco-actions, and measure CO2 savings as a crew.
✨ Grant Fund for Member Projects
Support regenerative, community-led initiatives at sea and along coastlines.
✨ Upgraded Crew Course
An improved digital learning experience to help more people transition to a wind-powered way of life.
✨ Integrated Education and Community Tools
Workshops, logbooks, and peer learning woven directly into our hub.
These tools reflect our mission: travel that is healthy, human-scale, and regenerative. By sail, in nature, and with community at the core.
Editor’s update (May 2026): the upgrades described in this dispatch were built and launched between June 2025 and May 2026. See the Building the Future of Sustainable Sea Travel post for the mid-project communication on what was delivered.
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 are exploring the possibility of sailing there from Sicily and 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 roughly one week.
A draft list of interested crew is already in progress. Many other awarded companies see value in alternatives to flying and are excited to shape another way of attending these events together with Ocean Nomads: less formal 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 help shape it. Our strength is 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 to Ocean Nomads in the first place, and sharing it with others who want a different kind of travel and lifestyle.
More to come,
Ocean Nomads Ambassador
