Commission boosts data sharing and innovation for a smart, sustainable and resilient EU tourism ecosystem

This article is brought to you in association with the European Commission.

Today, the Commission published a Communication presenting the building blocks for a common European tourism data space. This data space will allow tourism businesses and public authorities to share a broad range of data to inform the development of innovative tourism services, improve the sustainability of the tourism ecosystem and strengthen its economic competitiveness.

Tourism is a complex, fast-paced industrial ecosystem that produces and consumes a tremendous amount of data. The common European Tourism Data Space will:

• Facilitate data-sharing from diverse sources, such as business, local authorities, and academia, bringing together public and other relevant parties to shape the key features of the data space. For example, data on hotels’ energy consumption can help monitor the environmental impact of tourism on a given destination.
• Promote data access by a wide range of users, including business intermediaries, destination managers, tourism service providers, and others. For example, a start-up offering AI-driven tourism services will be able to use more relevant data. A travel agent will have a better overview of offers across cities, regions and borders. A local authority will have more information on tourism flows. This will help businesses, in particular smaller ones, as well as local authorities to create, improve and personalise services and support decision-making related to the sustainability of their tourism offer.
• Foster a consistent, trustworthy and efficient framework for the governance of this common European tourism data space, based on respect of existing EU and national legislation on data as well as common standards set at EU level. It will ensure a data governance model developed by all stakeholders in the tourism ecosystem: Member States, local and regional authorities, and the private sector as well as the EU institutions, supported by EU funding.

• Offer interoperability across data domains as well as sectoral data spaces, such as the common European data spaces for mobility; energy; environment; health; smart communities; cultural heritage, and other sectors with clear connections to the tourism experience.

Next Steps

Today’s Communication presents the key enablers of a tourism data space, and also explains the need to build it progressively, to ensure that all requirements of the interested parties are taken into account and that the process is aligned with the creation of other sectoral data spaces, to ensure interoperability among sectoral data. The Coordination and Support Actions under the Digital Europe Programme (DEP) will deliver a blueprint for the creation of the data space by end of 2023.

Background

Member States, regional and local authorities, and the private sector all collect data, modelling it to their own standards and needs. Data collected across different ecosystems are also relevant for tourism. At EU level, Eurostat has an agreement for sharing accommodation data with the private sector, on a voluntary basis; and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has developed, in 2021, the EU Tourism Dashboard as a tool to monitor the green and digital transitions and resilience of the tourism ecosystem.

The European strategy for data introduced common European data spaces in key economic sectors and domains of public interest as essential policy developments to feed both public and private sectors with relevant  data, for the benefit of the European economy and society. The Council Conclusions of 25 March 2021 supported the development of the data spaces. In line with this, in June 2022 the Communication from the Commission on the Conference on the Future of the EU mentioned both the tourism and the mobility data spaces as “new areas of action to consider” for the EU to embrace a digital transformation. The Transition Pathway for Tourism introduced the need for a “technical implementation for tourism data space”. The Transition Pathway for Tourism is currently being co-implemented with key stakeholders.

The European Tourism Agenda 2030, adopted by the Council of the European Union in December 2022 also called for the implementation of data-sharing practices in tourism. The Agenda is based on the Commission’s Transition Pathway for Tourism and includes a programme with actions to be taken by the EU countries, the