Justine Bauters joined the NECSTouR team in October 2022 as Projects & Sustainability Officer. 

Justine is in charge of a variety of responsibilities related to European Tourism projects, namely monitoring and helping the team further to elaborate the NECSTouR department ‘Tourism of Tomorrow Lab’, the NECSTouR Climate Action Plan and the DATES project funded by the EU within the Digital Europe Programme. Justine comes from Flanders. Thanks to her Bachelor’s studies in tourism in Brussels and her professional experience at a fast-growing travel start-up, she gained a wide range of insights into the functioning of our tourism ecosystem. She started querying the sense of sustainability and resilience of current destination management models. For this reason, she specialised in the Master’s Tourism Destination Management at the Breda University of Applied Sciences, gaining theoretical knowledge on tourism governance, tourism research and project management. Moreover, she undertook three-month field research on three different destinations in Europe. Justine finalised her studies by writing her thesis about ‘Regenerative Tourism’, and for this closely studied the strategy of Visit Flanders ‘Travel to Tomorrow’.