Lucia Tomassini & Radu Mihailescu
Across Europe, hospitality is changing. From small B&Bs and agriturismi to campsites, hostels, guest houses, and scattered hotels, alternative accommodations are increasingly shaping the future of tourism and hospitality – rooted in place, community, and local identity rather than standardisation and scale. It is precisely within this evolving landscape that the Erasmus+ vocational training project EPIC STAYS positions itself, offering free online learning modules for students, entrepreneurs, and practitioners interested in developing or strengthening alternative accommodation concepts in their own territories.
EPIC STAYS brings together vocational education, applied sciences, new ideas, and industry expertise to explore how alternative accommodations can be designed, managed, branded, and developed in sustainable and responsible ways. The project responds to a clear need: while many aspiring hosts and small entrepreneurs are driven by strong values – hospitality, sustainability, local engagement – they often lack structured, accessible, and practice-oriented educational resources tailored to their reality. EPIC STAYS addresses this gap by translating academic knowledge and professional experience into short, flexible, and freely available online modules.
Applied Learning as the Foundation
As project partner, the Hotel Management School Leeuwarden of NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences contributes also from a long-standing educational perspective. For several years, NHL Stenden University has been offering the minor Alternative Accommodations in Italy and beyond, a programme that has become a living laboratory for rethinking hospitality outside conventional hotel models. The minor explores alternative accommodations not simply as business formats, but as socio-cultural, spatial, and economic practices embedded in specific places and communities.
Bridging Education, Practice, and Values
This minor is also at the core of the EPIC STAYS project idea. The Erasmus+ project builds on the applied learning philosophy of universities of applied sciences, where theory and practice are continuously connected, and where students learn by engaging with real cases, territories, and entrepreneurs. EPIC STAYS extends this approach beyond the classroom, making knowledge available to a wider audience across Europe, particularly to vocational learners and small-scale hospitality actors who rarely have access to formal higher education programmes.
Learning for Real Contexts, Not One-Size-Fits-All Models
The project online modules cover key themes such as branding and storytelling, sustainability, guest experience design, local value creation, and business development for alternative accommodations. Importantly, these modules do not promote a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, they encourage learners to reflect on their own context: their territory, their values, their resources, and their communities. Whether someone is setting up a campsite in a rural area, managing a small guesthouse, or dreaming of a scattered hotel concept, EPIC STAYS offers conceptual tools, examples, case studies, and reflective exercises to support informed and conscious decision-making.
Shaping the Future of Hospitality
What makes EPIC STAYS particularly relevant today is its emphasis on future landscapes of hospitality. The project acknowledges that hospitality education can no longer focus solely on operational efficiency or growth-driven models. Instead, it must engage with questions of sustainability, identity, regeneration, and social impact. In this sense, EPIC STAYS is not only a training project but also a cultural intervention—inviting learners to rethink what it means to host, to care for places, and to create value in tourism.
European Collaboration for Inclusive Hospitality Education
The collaboration between Erasmus+ vocational education and universities of applied sciences demonstrates the strength of European partnerships in shaping innovative and inclusive forms of hospitality education. By combining academic insight, vocational relevance, and entrepreneurial experience, EPIC STAYS contributes to a shared vision: a hospitality sector that is locally rooted, ethically grounded, and creatively future-oriented.
For anyone curious about alternative accommodations – or already actively shaping them – EPIC STAYS offers an open invitation to learn, reflect, and imagine new possibilities for hospitality in Europe and beyond.
Written by;
Lucia Tomassini & Radu Mihailescu
Senior Researcher at Stenden University of Applied Sciences
English (UK) 
Slovenščina 
Íslenska 
Italiano 
Nederlands