Clio Muse Tours is "Rethinking Tourism."

This year's World Tourism Day invites us to Rethink Tourism and re-imagine the sector towards a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient future. Putting people and the planet first and bringing stakeholders and local communities together are the pillars on which this shift can happen.

The tourism industry has irreversibly changed after the pandemic. Digital media is here to stay, and with the impact of COVID-19, the need for sustainable tourism that respects the environment and local culture is coming more strongly to the fore. At Clio Muse Tours, we will continue what we have been doing since our inception: to use technology to make our cultural heritage accessible and approachable to everyone. Now, however, we believe that more and more people will share our vision and grasp the necessity of the market. Sustainable tourism has always been part of our philosophy, and we are honored to have been awarded four times for our efforts and practices to this end.

This is how why we do it, in a nutshell:

Supporting local professionals

Clio Muse Tours takes a scalable way to create high-quality digital tours, enabling tourism and culture professionals to develop their tours smoothly. They follow our content methodology to transform their knowledge into high-quality products for the tourism industry, we distribute them online thanks to our technology, and we both get paid for it. We are genuinely proud that in 2021 we were awarded by the United Nations World Tourism Organization for the SDG8: Decent Work and Economic Growth. To talk numbers, in the first semester of 2022, we paid 100,000 euros to professionals from the culture and tourism industries to create our products.

Creating content for all

Each tour follows our award-winning storytelling concept, creating an optimal experience for our visitors, a result we achieved after extensive research in collaboration with world-renowned museums for over two years. The challenge we are trying to face is to create content that all audiences can relate to and get engaged with. We believe that this is how we can inspire the world with values and ideals that will help overcome social crises and inequalities. We are aimed at children and adults of all ages, which is why our guided tours are written in a structured way: they start from more straightforward introductory stories and end up with more complex ones for history and culture connoisseurs. In the last few years, we have run significant collaborations with museums and cultural organizations and have created accessible tours for people with disabilities. Making our tours accessible is something we are planning to invest in, in the coming years.

Fostering equity in our team

Cultivating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is a top priority at Clio Muse Tours and is an integral part of our identity and culture. Eight years ago (or ten since our first meeting with Daphne and Andreas, co-founders of Clio Muse Tours), we started as a 3-people company and currently count 19 full-time employees, more than half are women, and 1/3 are not heterosexual. We didn't plan it; it just happened! We always focus on the personality and skills of our employees and give them the same opportunities no matter their age, gender, sexual orientation, or any other personal statements. 

Commemorating World Tourism Day this year, I realize that much has changed the last year in the sector, in our teams and businesses as well, and is about to change henceforward. Resilience and adaptability are the only ways to move forward and grow, though, and always have your vision in mind. At Clio Muse Tours, we aim to generate universal cultural awareness and guide you in every part of the world, utilizing pioneering technology, and we commit to doing it together. 

Yiannis Nikolopoulos,

Co-founder and CEO at Clio Muse Tours