By Daniel Iglesias, Industrial Engineer Necstour
As we stated in our last blog post, Generating the European Tourism Community, the D3HUB project aims to design and set up the European Competence Centre, which will help tourism destinations use data analysis to become more competitive, resilient, and sustainable.
This project will result from a co-creation process where all the EU tourism actors are invited to participate and express their needs, requirements, and priorities. This way, different events, surveys, and consultations will be launched, inviting stakeholders to participate.
The first consultation initiative has just been launched consisting of a survey to gather information that will be used to define the service portfolio that will be offered by the EU Tourism Competence Center.
To participate in this survey, please visit the D3HUB project website https://www.d3hub-competencecentre.eu/ and follow the link that appears in it.
The EU Competence Centre design principles
Several principles will guide the design of this EU Tourism Competence Centre:
- The Competence Centre won’t replace or overlap other existing (EU) initiatives. It will run collaboratively in parallel, helping them maximize their projects’ output and transfer the results methodologies to the EU Tourism Sector.
- The success of the future European Tourism Dataspace will depend on the acceptance and involvement of the different European Tourism Stakeholders (DMOs, Public bodies, tourism SMEs, etc.). An entity is needed to help the European Tourism Ecosystem to embrace the European Tourism Dataspace. The Competence Center has the opportunity to deliver services that bring the European Tourism Dataspace closer to the sector in a practical way.
- Thanks to its close contact with the European Tourism Ecosystem, the Competence Centre will also act as a feedback loop to inform all the other initiatives about the real needs, requirements, and priorities. This will allow other complementary initiatives to align their activities with those needs.
The EU Competence Centre positioning within the European Tourism Sector
In general, the Competence Centre will act as a catalyst for existing initiatives enhancing their impact on the tourism sector. The Competence Centre will also consider European tourist destinations’ interests, priorities, and needs. It is important to note that some European entities are not only or entirely “tourism-focused; that is, they are “generalists” covering other sectors and topics and not only focusing on Tourism. Here, the Competence Center will help them achieve a level of detail and implementation they could not reach independently.
Under the D3HUB project, the Competence Centre has already embarked on a collaborative journey with the rest of the European tourism ecosystem. This active participation was evident in our involvement in the Workshop: Mainstreaming Tourism Indicators for Sustainable Development, held on March 22. Here, we engaged with the main actors of the European statistical system and related entities, including Eurostat, Joint Research Center, OECD, and UN Tourism, presenting our approach to contribute to the development of indicators for sustainable development. During this event, the need to establish collaborations between the different initiatives to complement each other was also discussed.
If you want to be part of this exciting project, register as a stakeholder and participate in shaping the EU Competence Centre