The BEST MED project seminar “Developing a Network of Sustainable Tourism Observatories in the Mediterranean. Data management and sharing for sustainable tourism”  took place on the 16th December. The event hosted by Giuliano Tallone from the Lazio region, a NECSTouR member and the event main organizer, had more than 100 people connected on December 16th, and in Rome for a limited amount of invited participants. As a member of the Interreg MED Sustainable Tourism project and the developer of the Tourism of Tomorrow Lab, NECSTouR is taking part in this event.

• Please find the agenda of the event here
• The report / minutes of the seminar is available here.
• All the presentations are available here.

The seminar, co-organised and hosted by Lazio Region, a NECSTouR member, with the support of the CPMR, aimed to develop a new integrated and sustainable tourism planning with the scope of mitigating seasonality in the Mediterranean area, and has the concrete goal of laying the foundation for the creation of a Network of Sustainable Tourism Observatories in the Mediterranean area (NSTO) on the basis of a participatory approach. Close to its ending date, it was the occasion to showcase BEST MED achievements like the MED & S&C Path Model, presented by our partner Dolores Ordonez (from Any Solution). The indicators mentioned in the BEST MED platform are a direct heritage from the MITOMED+ project.

To this end, and building on the model developed by Interreg BEST MED partners, the key actors engaged in data collection and analysis have shared ideas and presented proposals to define priorities and operational aspects of the Network.

Many regions and partners of NECSTouR were present including Lazio Region, the organiser of the event, Tuscany region from the SMART MED project with Manuela Bigi who urged for “political mandate, skilled people and defined governance for tourism data space”. And of course, the Andalucía Region, starting with Jose Francisco Benitez, head of the Andalucía Lab, stating “the question of data management for sustainable tourism planning is adamant” and followed by a presentation from Ana Moniche on our action, the Tourism of Tomorrow Lab.

Josep Rodriguez presented the specific work and outputs on tourism data management from the Sustainable Tourism community. And some modular projects presented their own results, including BEST MED of course but also partners from MITOMED+, HERIT-DATA, DESTIMED and DestiMED Plus.

Tourism of Tomorrow Lab

NECSTouR was proud to be invited to the fourth round table: “A co-operation framework for data in sustainable tourism planning. Towards a NSTO in the Mediterranean region”. Cristina Nunez, director of NECSTouR, explained how data could help to respond to strategic questions to be competitive, sustainable and inclusive.

According to NECSTouR Vision to build together a competitive and sustainable model of tourism for Europe, our strategic action, the Tourism of Tomorrow Lab have been integrated as a proposed investment project into the core business of NECSTouR. The goal is to target the management of sustainability, the integration big data sources in destination management and to check the coherence of official statistics.

Download NECSTouR presentation here.

On the last roundtable, Davide Strangis of CPMR presented the idea for developing a Mediterranean network of sustainable tourism observatories to support “a common vision, a community of interest”.