OUTPACE: Popular Culture and Tourism

The Icelandic Tourism Research Centre (ITRC) was a partner in the European collaborative project about the influences of pop culture on tourism and the opportunities that can be harnessed.

OUTPACE was an EU Erasmus+ project which launched in late 2019 and brought together partners and experts from Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden and Ireland. The duration of the project was two years and it ended in November 2021.

Today, many up-and-coming tourism destinations are experiencing rapid growth directly because of their links to popular culture: television, film and music. OUTPACE aimed to harness the power of film induced tourism and popular culture to develop a new highly innovative pedagogy to support the acquisition of transferable, entrepreneurial and digital skills.

The overall aim of OUTPACE was to produce a rise in the number of tourism businesses which develop innovative products & services based on the opportunities afforded by pop culture tourism, thus generating more market-responsive & dynamic regional tourism economies.

Guðrún Þóra Gunnarsdóttir, director of ITRC, was the project manager for the Icelandic part of the project. Working alongside her on the Icelandic team were ITRC researchers, Vera Vilhjálmsdóttir and Elísabet Ögn Jóhannsdóttir.

Further information about the project and its partners can be found on the project’s website https://www.popculturetourism.eu/

In connection to the project, the partners created open educational resources, including a training program with six free modules, a manual, an app and other resources for those interested in learning more about how to harness the power of pop culture tourism in their own business and/or marketing.

All the free resources (and more) can be found on the project's website: