Now that we are approaching the end of the year, we are happy to summarise below some of the main 2022 achievements of the EU work in the area of tourism.

On 31 January 2022, the year started with a large-scale partnership in skills as a concrete implementation of the Pact for Skills in tourism. It has grown to incorporate 69 members representing industry, social partners/trade unions, vocational and education training providers, as well as national and regional authorities.

We take this opportunity to invite you to join the Pact for skills and be part of this partnership.

In 2023, a group of Junior Professionals will work on a project aiming at proposing fresh ideas on how to tackle skills shortages, as part of the Commission Junior Professional Programme.

In January, Bordeaux and Valencia celebrated the beginning of their year as 2022 European Capitals of Smart Tourism, and so did Middelfart (Denmark) crowned the European Destination of Excellence (EDEN) 2022. On 9 November 2022, we announced Pafos (Cyprus) and Seville (Spain) as the European Capitals of Smart Tourism and Kranj (Slovenia) as the European Destination of Excellence 2023.

If you want to know more about smart tourism, listen to a series of podcasts now available via the website

On 4 February 2022, we completed a long and extensive co-creation process with tourism stakeholders and published the Transition pathway for Tourism as the first transition pathway for EU industrial ecosystems, following the call of the Industrial Strategy update of 2021. - We would like here to thank once again all the persons involved in this process.

On 8 February 2022 we opened a call for tourism stakeholders to present their commitments to contribute to the tourism transition pathway through concrete pledges for actions. This has already resulted in 260 stakeholders’ pledges and commitments from 142 organisations published in two sets on 28 June and 28 October 2022.

We invite you to join the continuously expanding community and submit your pledge(s) through the online call for commitments and pledges. Next cut-off date for publication will be end of February 2023.

To follow-up on actions in the Transition Pathway for Tourism we intend to establish an expert group comprising a large palette of stakeholders. A call for applications for the selection of members of the new Expert Group named ‘TOGETHER FOR EU TOURISM (T4T)’ will be launched in January 2023. It will be published in the Register of Commission expert groups.

We will keep you updated in January 2023. It will be open to all, so feel free to apply!

A stakeholder platform to exchange information and best practices should become operational either at the end of 2023 or at the beginning of 2024.

On 19 October 2022, we were happy to launch the Commission's new EU Tourism Dashboard in cooperation with the Commission's science and knowledge service JRC to help policy makers steer policies and strategies based on new ways to combine data sources for creating policy-relevant indicators for green and digital transition and socio-economic resilience of tourism, made available in a user-friendly manner. If you have any comment or suggestion to improve this new tool, please let us know by sending your email to GROW-G1@ec.europa.eu.

We have also launched an important call for tenders, working towards post-Covid-19 Recovery: SME support under Sustainable Growth and Building Resilience in Tourism - Empowering SMEs to carry out the twin transition.

For more open calls, take a look at the “Currently open tourism calls” section of the Guide on EU funding for tourism or visit the Funding & Tenders portal.

On 1 December 2022, we celebrated our long collaboration with the Member States and EU Presidencies with the adoption of Council conclusions on the European Tourism Agenda 2030. It demonstrates the commitment and support of EU Member States to the action areas and objectives identified by you, the stakeholders, in the context of the Transition pathway, and sets the EU-level agenda for transition to greener, digitally enabled and resilient tourism.

You can find more information on the Council website : Competitiveness Council (Internal market and industry).

Please note also that the OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2022 report has been published on 8 December, with the support of the European Commission.

For next year, we are happy to announce the following news:

· In February 2023, we are planning more events and meetings related to the co-implementation of the transition pathway for tourism.

· We are also happy to announce that the next European Tourism Day will take place in Brussels in person on 5 May 2023.

So, save the date in your calendar of 2023.

If you want more information, please visit our web pages dedicated to Tourism (https://europa.eu).

Or Subscribe to the monthly DG GROW newsletter.

Thank you for your attention and do not hesitate to contact us.

We wish you a happy holiday season and an excellent year full of success!

GROW Tourism Team

European Commission

DG for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs

B-1049 Brussels/Belgium

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