One of the outputs of the Portuguese Presidency of the EU/2021, the EU Tourism Dashboard, was formally published in October 2022.
The tool was updated in 2023, with new indicators and values included, new political pillar graphics, and content adapted to the aforementioned indicators.
Designed and developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, in partnership with experts from Member States, international institutions - specifically the ETC - and various stakeholders, it is a knowledge tool that aims to gather, publish and provide meaningful overviews of indicators relevant to tourism, relating to ecosystem performance in relation to key policy objectives (ecological and digital transition), in order to identify issues and support political action.
This instrument allows for profiles to be created as well as for the comparative assessment of EU countries and regions according to the characteristics (indicators) of their tourism operations based on data collated from various (conventional and emerging) sources, with the greatest possible territorial granularity, going as far as the comparability of some indicators on a NUTS3 level.
From a user perspective, the Dashboard is divided into “content” and “interface”, making it possible to perform trend and comparison queries.
// Content is divided into two large groups:
1- Classic information, called Basic Tourist Descriptors, which contains additional data and statistics to provide a wider context and characterisation of the tourist operations of countries and regions (for example, tourism offer, tourist demand). In its current version, the Dashboard contains 12 tourism descriptors.
2- Policy pillars, grouped into three subgroups: i) environmental impacts; ii) digitalisation; iii) socioeconomic vulnerability.
This is the first version of this tool, which has been published in the hopes that it can be developed with the introduction of more tourism and tourism-related indicators (specifically in terms of sustainability, especially the carbon intensity of the subsectors), as well as other functionalities, meeting the initial proposal to provide a European tool available both to economic operators and consumers, and to decision-makers who need to monitor EU actions, initiatives and projects in the field of tourism.
The EU Tourism Dashboard is available in English.
