How do you build a tourism experience with a community, rather than about one? What does it actually look like in practice, and what does it take to do it well?
In this session, Jayni Gudka of Sama Sama International will draw on her years of experience co-designing tourism experiences with communities around the world to share what works, what doesn't, and what operators often underestimate going in.
Jayni will walk through real examples of co-creation done well — from Pink Rikshaws in India to Ninki Nanka Encounters in The Gambia and Refugee Voices Tours in Berlin — before sharing the methodology Sama Sama has developed through projects including TransHistorias in Brasília, Unseen Tours in London, and an upcoming UNESCO Storytelling research project for natural and cultural heritage preservation. She'll cover how to work with communities in a way that centres their agency, respects their capacity, and ensures ownership of the outputs stays where it belongs.
She'll also be honest about some of the lessons learned along the way — that the process requires intentional listening, learning and unlearning, that shortcuts don’t work when it comes to building trust, that capacity issues can derail timelines, and the pressure for quick results that can undermine the process. Through the session, you'll leave with a clearer sense about the steps that co-designing experiences requires, and the questions to ask before you start.
The session will end with an open conversation, and Jayni is keen to hear from members already working on the ground. If you're a DMC or hotel with community partnerships in place — or ambitions to build them — bring your questions and your challenges and we’ll share them together.
Beyond the session, Sama Sama is also available to support members directly. That includes facilitated co-design sprints to build or rework specific experiences with communities, storytelling capacity building for your team or your ground partners so the skills stay with you long after they’re involved, and a practical toolkit of community partnership protocols for exactly the kind of questions this session raises. And if you're at the very start of planning a new experience with a community, that's the best time to bring them in: they’d love to work alongside you from the first conversation, so what you build together is something the community is proud to call their own.
For members unable to join us live, the session will be recorded and shared on the Member Portal.