Common European Tourism Data Space: From Vision to Operational Reality

Authors:

• Eleonora Lorenzini (Director of the Travel Innovation Observatory, Politecnico di Milano)
• Dolores Ordóñez (Director at AnySolution and DEPLOYTOUR Coordinator)
• Nuno António (Assistant Professor, NOVA Information Management School, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Across Europe, tourism destinations are under growing pressure to make better use of data: to manage visitor flows, support sustainability, strengthen competitiveness, and involve a fragmented ecosystem of public and private actors. Yet the most important challenge is not simply technical. What recent pilot experiences show is that data sharing only creates value when organisations are able to work around shared purposes, clear roles, trusted conditions, and practical reasons to collaborate.

The experiences emerging from five tourism pilots reveal what happens when the idea of data sharing meets the operational realities of destinations, sectors, and institutions. Across all of them, the same lesson emerges: before data can circulate effectively, stakeholders need shared rules, clarified roles and a concrete reason to exchange information. This makes the discussion highly relevant beyond tourism itself, because many sectors face the same challenge of turning fragmented data into coordinated decision-making.

Tourism is a particularly demanding context in which to address this issue. Valuable information is rarely centralised and is instead distributed across a wide and fragmented ecosystem of actors, most of them small and medium-sized enterprises.

This is why the pilots matter. They are not simply demonstrations of infrastructure applied to isolated use cases. They show, in practical terms, how interoperability, governance, institutional readiness, and stakeholder engagement must develop together if a data space is to become operational and sustainable.

The Alpine pilot offers a strong example of this. Working across Austria, Italy, and Slovenia, it focuses on visitor management and sustainability scoring for Alpine tours. At first glance, this may seem like a classic interoperability challenge, requiring harmonised data from multiple territories. But in practice, the pilot shows that the cross-border dimension is as much organisational as technical. Different destination actors, public authorities, and statistical offices must align around what data can be shared, under which conditions, and for what purpose. What matters is the ability to build a shared decision-making logic across actors that have historically operated in separate institutional and territorial contexts.

A related lesson emerges from the pilot involving Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands. Here the focus is on resilience, sustainability, and competitiveness in mature tourism destinations. The key challenge is turning a wide range of public and private inputs into decision-support processes that destinations can actually use. This requires stakeholder engagement, governance arrangements, and role clarification across institutional boundaries. The pilot illustrates an important point for the broader European debate: data becomes useful not just when it is available, but when organisations are able to embed it in planning, management, and policy processes. In other words, operational value depends on both infrastructure and institutional readiness.

A different but equally important perspective comes from the Île-de-France pilot, which focuses on the MICE sector, meaning meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions. In this context, no single organisation has a complete view of the business traveller journey, yet many decisions depend on that broader picture. The pilot therefore works on use cases linked to sector intelligence, visitor understanding, decision support, and certification. It shows how a shared data space can bring together partial information from multiple actors to create more coherent and actionable insights for both private and public stakeholders.

The Ano Syros pilot adds another dimension by linking tourism data with cultural heritage and destination diversification. Its use cases focus on supporting preservation and sustainable tourism planning, helping officials and professionals conduct diagnostics and guide interventions more effectively. This pilot reminds us of the importance of considering cross-sectoral interdependencies and interoperability between data spaces operating under different domains.

The Lapland pilot brings the issue of SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) inclusion to the forefront. Its goal is to support tourism SMEs through more data-driven marketing and stronger year-round competitiveness. This is especially important for the wider European tourism ecosystem, where SMEs account for a large share of the market but often lack the resources or digital maturity to participate readily in data-sharing initiatives. The pilot shows that SMEs need trusted intermediaries, clear participation models, and practical support that lowers barriers to entry. This is a crucial message for Europe: a tourism data space cannot fully deliver its impact if it only works for the most advanced organisations.

Taken together, these five pilots are significant not only for the places in which they are being implemented, but for Europe as a whole. They reflect recurring challenges across destinations: fragmented data ecosystems, uneven digital maturity, coordination difficulties, and the need to translate data into practical decisions.

The pilots show that a tourism data space becomes real not only when systems are interoperable, but also when organisations are ready to collaborate around shared goals, defined responsibilities, and practical use cases, with a well-defined business model.

Building upon the foundational concepts introduced in our previous blog post, the work discussed in this article is based on the experience developed in DEPLOYTOUR, the project cofinanced by the European Commission which is exploring through five pilots how the Common European Tourism Data Space can move from vision to operational reality.

The production of this blog post was monitored within BDVA’s TF Tourism.