On 28 May, at the Competitiveness Council in Brussels, the EU27 ministers responsible for competitiveness will be asked to adopt conclusions on sustainable and competitive tourism, which should feed into the Commission’s future strategy on the subject.
The draft conclusions, dated 8 May and validated by the permanent ambassadors on Wednesday 13 May, recognise “the economic contribution of tourism in the EU which, in 2024, represented around 7% of it Gross Value Added, while tourism accounted for 10% of its jobs and 4.6 million businesses, of which 99% are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)” as well as the “tourism sector’s contribution to the overall competitiveness of the Union”.
The delivery of “a sustainable, competitive and resilient tourism ecosystem requires enabling tourism enterprises, in particular SMEs, destinations and other relevant actors, to mobilise and best utilise the relevant EU tools and instruments, including through simplified and improved access to available EU funding and financing, technical assistance and advisory support as well as structured capacity-building, peer-learning and exchange of good practices”, the document says, among other things.
While tourism is also affected by the Commission’s parallel work on the housing crisis, the document encourages Member States to deepen their understanding of balanced tourism by “systematically collecting, analysing and using data on spatial and seasonal concentration of tourist flows, development and tourism-related pressures, challenges and spread of benefits at destination level” or by improving tourism data correlation with housing pressures, labour market dynamics, environmental impacts and quality of life of residents.
The project recognises “the growing challenge of unbalanced tourism, understood as both ‘overtourism’ and ‘undertourism’, marked by spatial and seasonal concentration of tourist flows and investment, with pressure on certain destinations and missed opportunities elsewhere”.
The text calls for “further attention to be paid to peripheral, rural, island, mountainous and remote destinations in order to strengthen regional balance and unlock their tourism potential”.
It underlines as well the importance of cohesion policy in supporting sustainable and balanced tourism development and the resilience of destinations, in line with territorial strategies.
The document also points out that tourism is intrinsically linked to the well functioning of the Single Market and stresses that “smooth, secure and reliable cross-border travel and the avoidance of unjustified fragmentation of value and supply chains support a level playing field for tourism actors”.
Link to the document: https://aeur.eu/f/lw9 (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)