Apart from the natural diversity the Baltic Sea Region has everything a boating tourism region needs: festival highlights such as the Hanse Sail and the Kieler Woche, numerous smaller but no less attractive maritime events, about 1,500 marinas and some 500 traditional vessels sailing the Baltic Sea.What is missing is a cooperative marketing platform. Many maritime suppliers conduct their own marketing activities, but this leaves valuable potential untapped. It is to exploit this potential to the full that the MariTour Initiative has been launched. Headed by the local authority Klützer Winkel and the Hanse Sail Rostock, it enables marina operators, event organisers and operators of traditional vessels to pool their marketing activities under the sailBALTIC label and thus improve the market conditions for all those involved in maritime tourism. Achievements: The project has managed to set up a permanent informal network sailBALTIC Association lead by Hanse Sail Rostock and currently around 15 partners / members / contributors from almost all BSR countries. 1 person is working for the network (also after project finalisation). A working office has been installed (Rostock), statutes serve as working basis and a financial plan was prepared. Main objectives of the network is to promote BSR as first class sailing resort, by organizing events / fairs and support members in marketing. www.sailbaltic.com was created as main promotion and communication platform.A Baltic wide benchmarking study for leisure boat harbour operators has been executed. 70 harbours from almost all BSR countries were involved. A detailed questionnaire served as basis for the investigation. The study is composed of a database comprising business indicators from different marinas types. This enables comparison to be made, weak points to be spotted and improvements to be introduced.A Baltic wide marketing strategy for boating tourism has been developed. Under the motto "sailBALTIC" tourists from in- and outside the BSR are called to discover the first class sailing resort either by their own or chartered boat, by visiting the numerous maritime festivals or by taking a trip with a traditional sailing vessel.Under the label "sailBALTIC! 413.000 km² adventure, 21.600 km³ diversity - Discover the first class sailing resort" -a joint booth presentation at "boot" Düsseldorf 2007 and hanseboot 2006 was carried out by the Maritour partnership. Both presentations were used to promote the sailing resort Baltic Sea and to publish the new online internet portal www.sailbaltic.com. Visitors had the chance to discover the maritime offers of BSR online at several screens.MariTour presentation at "boot 2007" was connected with publication of www.saillbaltic.com the first and only portal covering maritime offer from the whole BSR are at one website. The visitor gets an overview about the complete marina infrastructure, can charter or buy boats online or has the possibility to plan his next sailing trip with the online tour planner. Moreover it is possible to book traditional sailing vessel trips or select maritime events worth to visit in the BSR event calendar.More than 300 traditional sailing vessels have been considered in a database which will be permanently updated. The database serves a basis for an online booking tool available under www.sailbaltic.com. Bookable offers have been createdBy using the automatic Identification system (AIS) MariTour has developed an online traditional sailing vessel tracker available at www.sailbaltic.com, which allows real time tracking of vessels. All vessels equipped with a transponder can be considered (the number of such vessels is increasing continuously). Interested customers can use the tool to contact the vessels directly to make booking enquiries. Maritime event organizers can use it for tracking the current position and estimating approximate arriving time of vessels to come. Necessary spaces and arrangements in the harbour can be planned well timed.In the framework of the pilot project "sailing lessons at secondary school in Sopot" numerous theoretical and practical courses covering a 2 year period have been carried out. More than 250 children could be involved. The model has been accepted beyond the area and will be continued after project finalisation. Other schools in Poland have started to adopt the model.