Support to Spain’s tourism ecosystem: towards a more sustainable, resilient, and digital tourism

The European Commission supported this flagship technical support project targeted at EU Member States wishing to build a more sustainable, resilient and digital tourism ecosystem. The flagship seeks to promote the digital and green transitions, strengthen regional cohesion and support the post COVID-19 recovery of tourism in Europe to make it fit for the future challenges in the global market. The flagship offers activity packages to enable Member States to engage in effective reforms in the area of the tourism ecosystem.

Context 

Monitoring tourism policies and measuring the sustainability of tourism are major challenges for Spanish regions, including Andalusia, Catalonia, Navarra, and Region of Valencia. Under its National Recovery and Resilience Plan, Spain has set out a comprehensive reform agenda and roadmap to modernise and build a more sustainable, resilient and competitive tourism sector. This requires improved tourism information systems at regional level, as available tourism data often lacks the granularity to provide comprehensive insights for decision-making at the regional destination level. Existing data gaps and time lags highlight the need for further investments in statistical capacity, while destinations face technical capacity, and budget difficulties in accessing and using new data sources. Moreover, previous experiences to develop a system of sustainable tourism indicators to support decision making have not had the desired impact, including due the lack of a well-established methodology supported by the official statistical system. 

Support delivered

• Analysing the current situation and priorities for developing a system of indicators to measure and monitor sustainability of tourism; 
• Identifying a draft set of indicators to measure the sustainability of tourism in beneficiary regions and organising three technical workshops to refine it; 
• Developing a compilation guide to implement the sustainability indicators; 
• Supporting the pilot testing of the indicators in selected destinations and evaluating the pilot testing; 
• Supporting a multi-country workshop on data sharing and integration.

Results achieved  

The main results of this support project will be upgraded regional tourism statistics to include sustainability.