PRIORITY ACTIONS FOR EU TOURISM 2015-2020

The action plan should include strategic and potential partnership between the European Commission, the public representatives, private industry, civil society, networks and academia by assigning them tasks in order to act as enablers of the established priorities.

1. Streamlining the regulatory and administrative framework impacting tourism at European level, but also at national, regional and local level.

• Assessment of the existing regulatory and administrative framework impacting on tourism with a focus on the EU level and close cooperation within the Commission with Directorate-Generals in lead for different simplification, fitness check or evaluation exercises regarding legislative initiatives which have a direct or indirect impact on tourism. This assessment needs to integrate the views and feedback from the European associations, federations, networks that have been analysing beforehand such policies.
• Streamline tourism in transversal legislative maesures: When legislative measures are initiated, consider the transversal dimension of tourism, and therefore the dierct and indirect impact these measures can have for tourism including the social, economic and environmental dimensions.
• Respond to the legal gaps existingh today on the following issues, by assessing which are the best existing/new measures the European Commission in cooperation with Member States and Regions could undertake on the Collaborative Economy and Price Parity.

Collaborative Economy

• Analyse this phenomenon in the tourism sector , by tackling subjects as competence, free market, social security contribution, taxes, consumer protection, legislative compliance and others.
• Ensure all collaboartive economy business providers adhere the related laws and regulations and operate on a level playing field with commercial operators.
• Reduce the legal gap by regulating at EU level to ensure all Member States have the same regulation, and avoid some Member States benefit from this legal gap and harm the competitiveness of Europe, the world's No 1 tourist destination.

Price Parity

• Tackle the issue of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) enforcing business to ensure price parity with excessive commissions of up to 24% and the growing influence of OTAs with search engines due to their multi million euros advertising budgets.
• Explore the EU competences to propose a regulatory measure to tackle the OTAs e.g. amendment on the Travel Package Directive by introducing a quota on the commission percentage of OTAs in Europe.

Quality Assessment System

• The current quality assessment system based on inspection should be changed to one validating the business promotion and infiormation on the internet, to ensure all reviews are from actual customers.

2. Promoting the digitalisation of the tourism SMEs

Address the priority as SMART tourism (in accordance with the EU 2020 strategy) to give a wider scope to innovation, not only on digitalisation, but also on process-oriented and business models innovation, including

• Product cycle phases: design, production, promotion, management;
• Enterprise culture models: co-opetition approach between tourism SMEs (rather than competition) leading to clusters, shared economy, circular economy; CSR
• Human capital investment and eco-innovation measures;
• Connections with other industries, Creative Europe concept
• Preparatory Action on the development of a Roadmap for SMART Tourism businesses focusing on the wider scope of innovation process, ICT, research and on the required skills.
• Promote the integration of the concept of Digital Agenda on the Regional Tourism Plans and Tourism Businesses, and support capacity building and skills development through structural funds.

3. Upgrading the skills and competences in the tourism sector

• Tourism must be considered under the educational sector as a social science career. The sustainability and accessibility dimension should be integrated along the whole educational/training programme, and not be approached as an individual course. The European Institutions' role, policies and funding programmes related to tourism should be integrated in all Member States tourism/educational/training programmes.
• Facilitate the exchange of good practices between the Member States universities and training institutes approaching tourism as a social science career with the Member States that are approaching tourism in a school base education system.
• The entrepreneurial skills should also be addressed to stimulate the continuous renovation/upgrading/updated curricula. Moreover, the e-skills required to ensure the tourism digitalization process should be included in the roadmap for Smart Tourism proposed under priority two.

4. Promoting sustainable and responsible tourism and finalising the European Charter for Sustainable and Responsible Tourism

• Address sustainable and responsible tourism as a red wire of the EU Tourism strategy rather than promoting it as a niche. Moreover, the transversal dimension of sustainable tourism should be considered when designing, developing and implementing EU tourism initiatives. Incorporating sustainability into the overall framework of the EU Tourism initiatives instead of approaching it as a niche action could set a good example towards public authorities competent in tourism, encouraging them to adopt sustainability as a strategy for development and avoiding superficial statements and greenwashing measures.
• Need to monitor in a more harmonised way the tourism destinations performance with regards to its sustainability and competitiveness. Measuring is crucial to smartly manage.
• Allocate some budgets enabling the possibility of measuring the implementation of the tourism projects awarded in COSME beyond the funding period. This monitoring should be done by selecting the most appropriate European Tourism Indicators System (ETIS).
• Link ETIS to the Virtual Tourism Observatory, especially as an online platform where destinations can bring in their datya in order to guarantee the quality assurance of the data collection.
• Align forces between ETIS and the UNWTO that is also on Indicators for Sustainable Tourism Destinations and Global Observatories on Sustainable Tourism.
• Reinforce the environmental and social dimension of the tourism policy.
• Develop a stronger cooperation between DG GROW-DG ENV-DG CLIMA together with the European Parliament, enabling a better coordination of the different EU measures in this field, for the benefit of the natural EU assets which are a key tourism resource
• Reinforce the European Commission commitment on the active conservation and protection of natural resources by tackling Energy.
• Develop an Impact Assessment on the Climate Change effects on the tourism economic, environment and social dimension, including regional existing good practices on Climate Change adaptation and mitigation measures through tourism.
• Reinforce the EU recognition and award of those regional initiatives leading to the improvement of the quality of life of residents, qa participative approach on the decision making process and a proper balance between tourist and local population.

5. Fostering low and medium season tourism exchanges

Overcoming seasonability should not be tackled only by targeting seniors and youth. The target group should be enlarged by focusing also on domestic tourists who can highly contribute to enlarge the tourism seasonality by travelling during the weekend and long weekends.

• Target third countries that follow different holidays calendar than in Europe: BRIC, USA, Canada, Australia and others. Encourage Member States, Regions and private stakeholders to undertake cooperation agreements for this purpose.
• Encourage staggering of school/college holiday to distribute visitation
• Link tourism initiatives with ERASMUS + Programme by encouraging universities, schools to undertake field trips during the year for tourism students and professionals from Europe and abroad.
• Work with the European Institute of Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe to strengthen the cooperation between the pilgrims associations in Europe and abroad.
• Consider the strong potential of sport, music and arts festival have to mobilize tourists from Europe and abroad.

6. Improving intermodality and transport connectivity

7. Joint promotion of Europe as a tourist destination mainly in third countries' markets

The promotion of Europe as a tourism destination should follow a more strategic line based on

• An Impact Assessment on the set of actions aiming at the at the promotion of transnational and pan-European thematic products.
• An Action Plan based on the needs identified by the results of the Impact Assessment suggested above. This action plan should also foresee the promotion of the European destination and business implementing the European Charter for Sustainable and Responsible Tourism, the EDEN destination and the pan-European thematic tourism products co-financed by the European Commission under the COSME calls.
• Reaching a more balanced EU action between the promotion-related efforts and the measures aiming at preparing the supply side to host the tourists coming from long-haul markets in a sustainable way.

8. Improving the governance of tourism

• Coordination of the Tourism governance at European level while ensuring the subsidiarity principle and acknowledging Tourism is a regional competence in many of the European Member States. As such, consider the regional needs and priorities in all stages of the EU Tourism initiatives: design, development, implementation and monitoring.
• Tourism Governance should be at the core of EU Tourism Strategy 2015-2020. To ensure this governance, a consistent and effective Public Private Partnership in tourism is required. Joint dialogue between European Commission and priavte, public stakeholders should be enhanced to discuss the priorities of the EU tourism agenda but also to participate in the decision making process.

Other Initiatives

1.Impact assessment of the EU tourism co-funded projects

• Analyse the performance of the tourism co-funded projects which results should be considered when developing new calls for proposals;
• Identify what kind of initiatives are needed to ensure sustainability of the tourism co-funded projects, in terms of long term continuity, self-finance strategies and integration in the territories;
• Explore the possibility of co-funding a lower number of projects to better address the needs found with larger budget to ensure longer term results.

2. Financial Opportunities for Tourism

• Organize more specific/thematic informative and brokerage events focusing on each of the key programmes, where the tourism sector can benefit from, in cooperation with the donors, beneficiaries and project engineers of these funds.
• Considering that the financial and human resources are/will be limited, the aavilable funding for tourism should be used selectively, preferably with a return on investment for the tourism sector and the host community.

3. Corporate Social Responsibility

4. Social Agenda of tourism (accessibility, holiday participation, families, people living in poverty should receive more attention from the European Commission acknowledging tourism as a fundamental human right.

5. Entrepreneurship in the tourism sector should run as a red wire though the activities of the European Commission.