PROJECT FRAMEWORK The region of Pieria economy relies heavily on tourism. Unfortunately, the tourist season lasts 3-4 months, mainly during the summer months. The remainder of the year, hostels and small hotel accommodations remain either inactive or barely functioning, with obvious effects on the local economy and workforce employment. It is therefore necessary that touristic season should be extended as much as possible and preferably to the year-round. In achieving this goal will significantly help the adoption of methods and practices in the field of agrotourism and ecology, which will include the promotion of local cultures, gastronomy, the diversity of agricultural products in general and the local traditional lifestyle. DESCRIPTION TARGET-METHODOLOGY-PROFILE & NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS This mobility project involves staff training in agrotourism enterprises, in cooperation and in benefit of the Hotel Association of Pieria. The general objective is the agrotourism enterprises of Pieria to adopt new good practices or improve existing ones already applied in order to become more competitive and attract more visitors for longer. In particular the objectives are the participants to: 1. Get to know new successful business practices applied by other agrotourism enterprices abroad. 2. To enrich their own business activities and processes to those ones learned during the visit abroad. 3. Know the international competitive environment in business operating so that they can adapt successfully to this. 4. To determine the comparative advantages of the Greek place in which they operate and promote them. 5. Establish contacts and communication network with colleagues in European countries. To achieve that objective, the mobility plan envisages visits to the Italian regions like Tuscany, where respective companies active in agrotourism implement successfully such practices and have managed to substantially lengthen the tourist season. Participants will have the opportunity to visit on the spot such units, to learn about their function, to implement job shadowing and exchange views with the owners and their staff. The training staff will be 20 people from the staff of different agrotourism units of Pieria. There will be four mobility flows, 5 people per flow(total 20), who will attend 5-day job shadowing training program in agritourism businesses. Small groups of 5 people provides flexibility in meeting the educational needs of all participants. RESULTS-IMPACT-TERM BENEFITS The expected results for participants: 1. They will be able to apply good practices and procedures followed their training in foreign companies and thus improve the competitiveness of their businesses. 2. They will understand from first hand the professional culture of their foreign colleagues. 3. They will have the opportunity to develop personal relationships with business personnel visited, which will continue after the end of the activity. 4. They will improve their professional competence which will give them confidence and certainty. 5. Having experienced the business characteristics of foreign companies will be able to compete successfully. The above results and good practices to be obtained from the project will be disseminated to the activities planned by the project such as information sessions, distribution of brochures, press releases in newspapers and posting all the details on the website of the Hotel Association of Pieria, Hellenic Chamber of Hotels and online social networks. These actions will be accessible to all interested companies to local, regional and national level. In the long run this project hopes to be the beginning of knowledge exchanging and collaboration with agrotourism professionals abroad, starting from Italy and aiming in the future for cooperation with professionals from other European countries that have developed agrotourism activities. So the business extroversion will be developed and the creation of permanent communication networks will be established with similar businesses abroad.