European Commission unveils common tourism data space for sustainable tourism

The European Commission published a Communication outlining building blocks for a common European tourism data space to enable data-sharing among tourism businesses and public authorities. The initiative shows how data infrastructure can support sustainability monitoring, a model relevant to Indian tourism and data-driven service providers.

The European Commission published a Communication outlining the building blocks for a common European tourism data space, an initiative to foster collaboration and data-sharing among tourism businesses and public authorities. The data space aims to drive innovation in tourism services, bolster sustainability, and enhance economic competitiveness. It will enable exchange of data from businesses, local authorities, and academic institutions, allowing better monitoring of tourism's environmental impact, for example using data on hotels' energy consumption to assess a destination's sustainability.

The initiative affects tourism businesses, startups, destination managers, service providers, and public authorities. Shared data will be accessible to business intermediaries, destination managers, and tourism service providers, empowering smaller businesses and local authorities to create and personalise services and make sustainability-informed decisions. A startup offering AI-driven tourism services can leverage more relevant data, while travel agents gain a comprehensive overview of offers across cities, regions, and borders. The data space promotes interoperability across mobility, energy, environment, health, and cultural-heritage domains.

Stakeholders should track delivery of the data space blueprint, due by end of 2023 under the Digital Europe Programme's Coordination and Support Actions. Eurostat already has an agreement to share accommodation data voluntarily with the private sector at EU level, and the Joint Research Centre's EU Tourism Dashboard, launched in 2021, monitors green and digital transitions. The European Tourism Agenda 2030, adopted in December 2022, emphasises data-sharing. Indian tourism firms can reference this framework for sustainability monitoring.

Key figure — Delivery deadline: tourism data space blueprint due by end of 2023