A partnership has been established between the FAST project – Tools for Supporting Sustainability in Tourism – and Biosphere Portugal with the aim of engaging and empowering companies in the tourism sector to use the ORVE digital platform – Optimization of Resources and Enhancement of the Experience – a tool developed to support monitoring and management of sustainability in tourism destinations, as announced in a press release.
According to the same source, integrated in the Operational and Intelligent Agenda for Sustainability (PRR Programme), FAST is led by the CiTUR – Center for Research, Development and Innovation in Tourism, based at the School of Tourism and Maritime Technology (ESTM) of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, in Peniche.
This collaboration brings companies closer to digital tools that strengthen the sustainable management of tourism destinations. To this end, webinars are being promoted aimed at sector enterprises, such as hotels, restaurants and other tourism entities, to present how ORVE works and to encourage its use.
After these sessions, individual capacity-building actions will be carried out with each participating company, with the aim of supporting the integration of the tool into their management practices, Biosphere Portugal being responsible for mobilising the companies and for providing technical support in integrating the platform into sustainability management practices.
The ORVE platform was designed to collect and analyse data related to different dimensions of tourism activity, such as resource consumption, mobility or environmental footprint, enabling the generation of indicators that support companies and destination management entities in making more informed and sustainable decisions. The tool is provided free of charge to companies within the PRR.
“For it to be possible to manage tourist destinations more sustainably, it is essential that we have access to reliable and integrated data. The ORVE platform was created precisely to support this monitoring and to enable companies and destination managers to make more informed decisions based on evidence,” explains Francisco Dias, scientific coordinator of the FAST project and a lecturer at ESTM, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria.
In an initial phase of the FAST project, 12 pilot sessions were conducted, allowing 12 companies from the Centro region to be integrated into the platform. In this new stage of the project, the aim is to broaden involvement to around 200 companies in the region, strengthening data collection and promoting broader use of the tool in the tourism sector. The collected data are treated in aggregate and anonymized form, enabling the generation of global indicators that support trend analysis and the definition of sustainability policies and strategies for tourism destinations.
In a later phase, the objective is to expand the platform to thousands of companies nationwide.
“The collaboration of companies is essential for the functioning of the platform. Without data it is not possible to understand the impacts of tourism activity nor to support more sustainable destination management. What ORVE allows is to transform dispersed data into useful knowledge for businesses, destinations and communities,” adds Francisco Dias.
Within the framework of the partnership established with Biosphere Portugal, the NOOSPHERE – Digital Tools for Sustainability in Tourism reference framework is also being developed, a model that aims to recognise companies and tourism destinations that use digital tools – ORVE or other interoperable tools – to monitor and integrate sustainability data into their management processes.
The focus of the reference framework is not on sustainability performance per se, but on the quality, intensity and consistency of the use of digital tools, based on a clear principle: digital data only generate value when they support management decisions.
“The digitisation of information is an essential step to improve sustainability management in tourism. The ORVE platform allows transforming operational data into useful knowledge for businesses and destinations,” says Patrícia Araújo, CEO of Biosphere Portugal, which is part of the international Biosphere Sustainable Certification Referencing network, based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, supporting businesses and tourist destinations in implementing sustainable management systems.
Parallel, the integration of Artificial Intelligence into the tools of the ORVE platform is also under development, in a partnership with the technology company Mediaweb, based in Leiria and responsible for maintaining the platform. This technological evolution, planned for the first half of 2026, aims to facilitate the use of the platform by companies and make the data collection and analysis process more intuitive.
