1 June 2022 – Brussels, Belgium: Gaia-X, the frontrunner of the European and global democratic approach to digitalisation and data spaces, announces its Tourism Data Spaces online event on 9 June 2022 from 09:30 – 16:00 CET.
International experts, hospitality practitioners, and tourism representatives will discuss “How can dataspaces contribute to the tourism development in Europe through citizen-centred offerings?”.
The focus will be on the requirements and the necessity for a secure, decentralised, and civic-oriented European Tourism data space.
The COVID-19 outbreak posed an unprecedented threat to the tourism industry as the sector’s GDP halved from 9.4% in 2019 to 4.9% in 2020, where international tourism arrivals in Europe have dropped by 70%. The health crisis seriously debilitated tourism. The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) reports that 3.6 million jobs in the EU were lost since the outbreak of the pandemic. Tourism job losses ranged between 14.2 and 29.5 million displacements.
Adding to this picture, 90% of the world’s enterprises already leverage one or more public clouds in their enterprise environment. COVID-19 further accelerated enterprise migration to the public cloud, with most businesses reaping the benefits of digitalisation. Gaia-X will examine the future of the European data ecosystem concerning tourism across enterprises in a post-COVID digital Europe, bringing together international experts from the public and private sectors.
“The European continent is a vibrant combination of culture, cuisine and shared history, and our heritage is valued across the world. This sector also represents the economic structure of Europe, as it is predominantly composed of small and medium-sized enterprises. Sadly, SMEs were the most exposed to the COVID-19 economic crisis. This is why we believe that a tourism data space can further strengthen the sector and the market overall,” Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Gaia-X, highlighted.
Our experts will unfold the future initiatives of the most prestigious tourism destinations, regulations, and architecture for the tourism data space system. The event will culminate in three sessions designed to create an atmosphere of cross-border collaboration that will help to create a sustainable data infrastructure for the tourism industry.
Tomás Mallo, Business Development for Touristic Destinations at Atos Iberia, highlights that “A federated data infrastructure for Europe is a cornerstone towards a true, vibrant data economy. This Gaia-X event will help reignite the digital tourism sector, given its focus on trusted data exchanges between all the actors in the value chain (including citizens) and on the sustainability of the destinations.”
The third event of the Gaia-X data space series with the title ‘’How can dataspaces contribute to the tourism development in Europe through citizen-centred offerings?”, follows the earlier Mobility Data Space and Health Data Space events that initiated this program.
“We need to define an operational framework to boost Data sovereignty in the EU and to increase our competitiveness in all industrial sectors. In particular to tourism, where Spain has important know-how to share, personal data sovereignty becomes crucial and needs to be developed, respecting fundamental rights without slowing down innovation,” highlighted Carme Artigas, Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. See the video invitation here.
Such high-level events present the added value brought by Gaia-X, which leads the creation of an overarching dataspace ecosystem in Europe, whereby the Tourism sector will play a vital role.
“A European Tourism Data Space will democratise and facilitate access to data, ensuring the participation of the whole tourism ecosystem, with particular attention to SMEs, hence contributing to the increase of the sector’s competitiveness and positioning Europe as a worldwide Tourism leader”, highlighted Dolores Ordóñez, Director of Anysolution S.L.
The aim is to bring together diversified groups and sectors that will eventually realise the overarching mission of Gaia-X to establish digital sovereignty across various sectors, including tourism, based on the principles of transparency, openness, and trust.
“EONA-X, worldwide Mobility, Transport and Tourism dataspace aims to facilitate the data exchange to clearly enhance the safety, planning, sustainability, comfort, resilience, accessibility, and fun of all activities involved. This will ultimately generate opportunities for economic development and better quality of services both at a national and international levels. Specifically on tourism, it is important to highlight that the sector brings together a large pool of actors, mainly SMEs, with a relatively low digital investment capacity. In parallel, they have many links with other sectors (e.g., culture, energy, mobility, etc.). Both such elements necessitate the creation of a tourism data space that follows a simple, cost-efficient and with a high degree of standardisation process”, highlighted Jean-François Cases, EONA-X President, and VP & Associate General Counsel of Amadeus.
In addition to this event, the coming months will see other significant activities with Gaia-X, having launched an inspirational Gaia-X Editorial Calendar for 2022, covering various events surrounding the domains of Health, Mobility, Tourism, Agriculture, and Manufacturing data spaces, alongside EU Funding events, Hackathons, Tech Dives, and membership onboarding webinars among other activities.
For instance, this year’s calendar features important product lines, including the Gaia-X Magazine and our Gaia-X podcast series, working hand in hand with influential personalities openly and actively contributing to, informing about, and discussing the impact that Gaia-X brings in building the next most aspiring and inspiring data space ecosystem.
