Transitioning to a more sustainable and resilient ecosystem – empowering tourism SMEs

1. Enhanced resilience and competitiveness of tourism SMEs through better uptake of sustainability principles, accessibility aspects, innovation, and digitalisation (i.e. use of new technologies, greening, data) and through increased capacity to track the footprints;

2. New business models in tourism building on digitalisation, new technologies, sustainability, accessibility, services for all types of customers, circularity, involvement of local communities and long-term visitors;

3. Enhanced cooperation along the tourism value chain;

4. Improved transnational and cross-border cooperation, knowledge transfer and peer learning;

5. Support to recovery of the tourism ecosystem from the shocks caused by COVID-19 and the Russian military aggression in Ukraine by developing and providing best practices for recovery investments with long-term effects for green and digital transition.

This call for proposals will aim at equipping and empowering SMEs to transition towards more sustainable and resilient practices as prioritised in the Tourism Transition Pathway (under the Industrial Strategy Update (COM(2021)350 final).

The action will contribute to the transition of the European tourism ecosystem by providing direct and indirect support, be it financial or consultative, including with the intermediary of consortia of organisations of the relevant tourism industry stakeholders, to SMEs, including start-ups and entrepreneurs, who wish to develop innovative concepts and projects contributing to the transition of EU tourism. This may also include further development and transfer of best practices and solutions identified through previous calls.

The activity will aim to provide:

• Direct support to innovative projects presented by third parties, e.g. SMEs,
• Technical support, advice and capacity building to the highest possible number of SMEs based on their needs, attempting to cover a wide geographical scope,
• Collection of best practices with the purpose of providing policy makers with updated, empirical evidence of the implementation of the priorities set out in the Transition Pathway for Tourism.