On 31st March, Tourism of Tomorrow Lab - the new NECSTouR Department which delivers services based on data to Premium members - fulfilled its first deliverable in the form of the webinar  "Strategies to Attract Technological Talent to the Tourism Sector: A Study for the Valencia Region".

Download the full Executive Summary of the report here or watch the Webinar (Spanish) here

The Webinar

This first work was for the Valencian Community with the aim of improving the economic and social sustainability of tourism, identifying ideas and concrete proposals to develop actions aimed at attracting, retaining and training technological talent for the tourism sector.

The webinar offered members useful information to answer three specific questions:

• What is the situation in relation to the talent we want to recruit?
• What are the strategies that we can deploy?
• What topics and methodologies can we support?

Executive Summary of the Report

Following this, the report for this deliverable has now been released and the Executive Summary is available to read. This document is a brief summary of a broader work, developed for the Valencia Region, which aims to improve efforts to attract, retain, and train technological talent for the tourism sector.

The study replies to the three specific questions highlighted above. The investigation is based on the analysis of studies and articles about the topic, specific research in the market on technology profiles, especially related to the tourism sector, and the in-house knowledge of the drafting team from other initiatives that follow the same direction.

Conclusions of the Report

The study acknowledges the difficulty of attracting technological talent to the tourism sector, underlining that success will depend on our capacity to create a community of professionals with technological talent around the tourism sector. To do this several strategies must be reinforced simultaneously:

• Creating a talent pool
• Building the capacity of existing resources
• Bringing the tourism business closer to technological talent

The creation of this community must be based on the appropriate themes and methodologies in which learning takes place in teams, forging relationships between people who support each other in a continuous learning process. The tourism sector must also make the most of its attractiveness and experience, as an industry of happiness, to meet the new demands of this type of professionals. The real challenge of the sector is more related to management and marketing than with technology: It consists of making the sector attractive to talent and forging the right alliances to achieve this.