Note on the source. This source should be read with caution: it may be funded by the sector, a draft or a thesis, or rely on self-reported or modelled data. See the limitations below.
The question
How can a common European tourism data space be built that lets public and private parties share data reliably, and with what governance rules, technical components, business models and initial use cases?
The method
Design document based on: inventories of more than 900 tourism data initiatives and sources, stakeholder consultations (questionnaire with n = 201 on perceptions of data), a review of EU initiatives and rules, and a conjoint analysis experiment with 392 valid responses collected in August-September 2023 to assess governance and business options.
What the study finds
- In the survey of tourism stakeholders (201 responses), visitor-flow, location and real-time data rank among the most wanted yet hard-to-get data, alongside economic indicators and environmental and climate data. Even the data that can be accessed are often patchy, poorly compatible and out of date.
- To run the European tourism data space, the draft recommends a European body with legal personality, either public or a not-for-profit public-private partnership, endorsed by the Commission and backed by expert working groups. In the validation survey, stakeholders were strongly negative about purely private funding.
- According to the document, destinations will play a central role because nearly all initiatives will take shape locally. However, the open-data approach typical of public administrations has to be reconciled with that of businesses, which seek to earn value from their data and keep control of it.
- Proposed use cases include sustainability indicator dashboards with alert thresholds, forecasts of when a point of interest will exceed its capacity, and recommender systems suggesting alternatives to destination managers and visitors. Another use case envisages resident-facing dashboards showing visitor numbers and congestion levels.
- The tourism data space will need to link with those of other sectors; according to the document the most valuable are mobility, cultural heritage, the Green Deal and energy. For now a company can only join several spaces one by one, a pragmatic solution that does not scale.
The document outlines rules and infrastructure through which European destinations, businesses and public bodies could share tourism-flow data without losing control of it. It does not cover ports or cruises, but it shows that the data most useful for real-time flow management are currently the hardest to obtain, and that linking with mobility data is a priority.
Limitations
A design and policy document, not an empirical study: the recommendations are untested and many technical components were still under development. It does not deal with ports or cruises; the use cases are generic. Some data come from earlier reports by the two consortia.
Stienmetz, J., Kolomoyets, Y., Dan, D., Zekan, B., Gunter, U., Tomás, M., Arias, J., Dimova, L., Iduh, J., Ordóñez, D., Butler, T., Dorenti, B., Pol, E., Dion, O., Sanchez, V., Iglesias, D., Cases, J.-F., De Lama Sánchez, N. (2023). Blueprint and Roadmap for Deploying the European Tourism Data Space (Final Draft 3.0). Consorzi DATES e DSFT (Coordination and Support Actions per lo spazio europeo dei dati sul turismo, Programma Europa Digitale) – documento per la Commissione europea.
Summary written by the ODYBOAT Observatory in our own words. Tables and figures belong to the authors.