C 263/4
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
26.7.2023
As natural partners to a data space, national and Union level statistical bodies play a pivotal role, making official statistics available free of charge, supporting the interoperability within and across statistical domains, and enabling the reuse of the existing data for the production of innovative or enhanced official statistics, possibly supporting regulatory reporting needs.
A better, more personalised, and more sustainable tourism offer, accompanied by consistent support policy measures at national, regional and local level, is key for Europe to remain the most visited tourism destination in the world in an innovative and sustainable manner, and, as explained below in more details, the tourism data space can facilitate this outcome.
Data can help identify, measure and improve the impact of tourism on sustainability.
Examples include data on hotels’ energy consumption, renewable energy certificates, water consumption and wastewater processing.
Or, agro-food traceability tools can support local supply chains, thereby lowering the environmental impact of the restoration sector while supporting rural tourism.
Another example of the benefits of sharing data across domains and sectors is the interoperability between the European tourism data space and European health data space.
Sharing electronic health data can be extremely helpful for both the traveller and the host country to plan and propose adequate healthcare support.
As such, the benefits provided by enhanced data sharing would impact the market as a whole, including large platforms which are the primary data holders of tourism-related commercial data.
1.2.
The challenges of sharing tourism-related information The tourism sector faces three specific challenges regarding data sharing, which need to be tackled by the key enablers of the common European data space for tourism (see paragraph 2):
1.
Interoperability of data
Designing, managing, and offering a tourism experience, for decision-making or innovation purposes, requires a variety of non-personal data.
A distinctive feature of the tourism sector is that any data domain could potentially be useful to set up a tourism experience (i.e. mobility, energy, environment, cultural heritage, urban planning, health, etc), albeit with key sets of non-personal data being of particular interest to operators.
Extensive consultations of stakeholders carried out by the European Commission between 2021 and 2023 have identified datasets particularly relevant for the operators (depending on the use case and the purpose of data collection): accommodation availability and demand; travelling opportunities and demand; environmental and social impact of tourism; and offer and market trends.
The key challenge is therefore to share and compare information from different sources, avoiding overlaps and duplicates to the best possible extent, within a framework of interoperability that is shared with other sectoral data.
If possible, standards could be explored that are already in use and spread across stakeholders (see 2.3).
2.
Access to data
The EU tourism ecosystem does not count on a common market platform: offers are modelled and catalogued both by private operators and by public authorities at national, regional and local levels creating a diverse, rich, and multilingual landscape, and bookings are managed both through platforms (large and small) and independently by providers.
While the common EU tourism data space does not act as a market operator (i.e. it will not allow nor centralise bookings), it may offer operators searchability tools for information (see 2.2).
3.
Provision of data by public and private stakeholders
Data can be open (such as schedules, traffic, and weather information, as an example, or data extracted from web browsing), but it can also be private, commercial, and sensitive.
To the extent personal data are shared, all stakeholders must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (8).
As regards commercial data, which comprises the bulk of information related to bookings, travelling, web searches and payments, it is held by a small number of large actors, who need to be included in the discussion about rules governing data access within the data space.
(8) Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) (OJ L 119, 4.5.2016, p. 1).