On 4 November 2026 the European Commission adopted the EU Sustainable Tourism Strategy (COM(2026) 777 final). The Communication presents tourism as a strategic sector for the Union’s competitiveness, sustainability and resilience, and it organises the Commission’s response around three pillars and ten action areas. Skills development occupies a prominent place in this framework, which makes the document directly relevant to the vocational education and training (VET) community that EVBB represents.
This is a policy plan, not a law. It shows where EU tourism policy is heading over the next few years, and it gives projects like ours something concrete to point to when we talk to funders and national authorities.
Context and scope
The Strategy begins from the sector’s economic weight:
The EU received close to 600 million international tourists in 2025, almost 40% of global arrivals. Tourism employs more than 20 million people in around 5 million companies, 99% of which are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The Commission argues that this scale justifies a more coordinated EU-level policy response, a demand previously raised by the European Parliament, the Council and several advisory bodies. The Strategy builds on the 2022 Transition Pathway for Tourism and the Council’s European Agenda for Tourism 2030.
Tourism is one of Europe’s biggest employers, and most of those jobs sit in very small businesses such as family hotels, guesthouses and local tour operators. The Commission wants the EU countries to act together on the sector instead of each handling it alone.
The Communication also stresses that its measures respect national competences under Article 195 TFEU. In practice, most actions take the form of coordination, guidance, data provision and funding support, not binding legislation, with a few exceptions such as the announced VAT and Quality Jobs Act proposals.
The EU cannot tell a country how to run its tourism. It can share data, publish guidance and offer money, and each country then decides how much of it to use. Real change depends on national and regional governments taking it up.
Skills and talent
The Strategy identifies labour and skills shortages as a major obstacle to the sector’s development. It reports that 92% of tourism SMEs find it difficult to recruit skilled staff, mainly because applicants lack the required skills.
Nearly every hotel or tour company owner struggles to find people with the right skills. Everything else in this section is an attempt to fix that problem.
The central measure is the EU Tourism Academy, to be launched in the second half of 2027. It will operate through a network of national tourism institutes, universities and vocational training institutes, which will develop and pool training content, and it will offer digital microcredentials. The Academy will rely on labour market analysis and skills forecasts from the European Skills Intelligence Observatory. The Commission also points to its proposed Skills Portability Initiative, which would oblige Member States to issue interoperable and secure digital credentials and to provide comparable information on qualifications.
Picture one shared EU training offer that VET schools and tourism institutes in different countries can plug into. A microcredential is a short certified course on a single skill, which a worker adds to their record. If every country recognises these credentials, a trained receptionist or chef could show their skills to an employer in another Member State without starting the paperwork from scratch.
The Strategy addresses job quality as well. The Commission will publish a study on working conditions in tourism, including collective bargaining, by 2028. It intends to launch new social dialogue for the hotel, restaurant and catering sector, and it will present a legislative proposal for a Quality Jobs Act by the end of 2026. Where shortages persist after all options within the EU have been explored, Member States are invited to use the Seasonal Workers Directive, the EU Talent Pool and Talent Partnerships.
The EU wants to understand why tourism jobs are hard to fill and what would make them more attractive, for example by looking at pay and working conditions. Hiring seasonal workers from outside the EU stays an option, but only after employers have tried to fill the jobs inside the EU first.
The place of EVBB’s projects
The Strategy states that the Academy will draw on existing EU skills project deliverables, on the large-scale partnership in tourism under the Pact for Skills, and on the blueprint alliances for sectoral cooperation on skills in tourism. The FUTOUR Alliance is cited by name in a footnote supporting this passage.
The Commission does not plan to build the Academy from zero. It says it will reuse what earlier EU projects have already produced, which gives our project results a possible route into the Academy.
EVBB coordinates FuTourAlliance, an Erasmus+ Blueprint alliance running from January 2026 to 2029. Its work packages cover tourism skills and training intelligence, guidelines for microcredentials, a position paper on the portability of skills, pilot training, and the governance of a large-scale skills partnership. These themes correspond closely to the functions the Commission assigns to the Academy and to the Skills Portability Initiative.
What FuTourAlliance produces, such as the microcredential guidelines and the portability paper, is the kind of material the Academy will need. We can credibly offer it as ready input instead of waiting to be asked.
PANTOUR (Pact for Next Tourism Generation Skills) is not named in the Communication. Nevertheless, the general reference to blueprint alliances and existing project deliverables encompasses its results. EVBB took part in PANTOUR as a partner from June 2022 to June 2026, and the project produced instruments such as the Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor and a series of country skills profile reports. EVBB also co-coordinates the Pact for Skills in Tourism together with RuralTour.
PANTOUR has finished, but its tools and reports still count as existing project results. It makes sense to keep referring to them, so that this work does not disappear once the project ends.
Taken together, these elements suggest that the evidence base and the networks on which the Strategy relies derive in part from projects of this kind.
Years of project work now show up in an official EU strategy. That visibility can help when we talk to partners, funders and policymakers about follow-up work.
Other measures
- Simplification. An EU Simplification Initiative for tourism by 2027, and a proposal to modernise VAT rules for travel and tourism by the end of 2026.
- Data. Deployment of the Common European Tourism Data Space by 2029, and the creation of an EU Tourism Observatory by 2027.
- Balanced tourism. A proposal for a Council Recommendation on Balanced Tourism Management and an EU Toolbox, motivated in part by seasonality: 42% of all nights are spent in the three most popular months.
- Resilience. An EU Tourism Crisis Coordination Network by 2027.
- Sustainability. Renewed EU Ecolabel criteria for tourist accommodation and a climate toolkit for SMEs, both by 2028.
For tourism businesses, the expected effects are less paperwork, better data on visitors, help with spreading tourists across the year, and support for planning around crises and climate change. Most of this arrives gradually in 2027 and 2028, not all at once.
Funding
The Commission notes that tourism currently benefits from 15 EU financing programmes. For the 2028 to 2034 period, its budget proposal makes specific reference to sustainable tourism and retains Erasmus+ as the instrument supporting education and training. The Strategy itself acknowledges that the scope and availability of this support depend on the outcome of the ongoing budget negotiations.
Whether projects like ours can find funding after 2027 depends partly on this budget. Erasmus+ staying in the proposal is a good sign, but nothing is guaranteed until the EU governments and the Parliament agree on the final amounts.
Timeline
- End of 2026VAT proposal for travel and tourism; Quality Jobs Act proposal.
- First half of 2027EU Simplification Initiative; EU Tourism Observatory.
- Second half of 2027EU Tourism Academy; EU Tourism Alliance; Council Recommendation on Balanced Tourism Management; EU Tourism Crisis Coordination Network.
- 2028Study on working conditions; renewed Ecolabel criteria; SME climate toolkit.
The coming months bring mostly proposals and announcements. The concrete tools, including the Academy, start to appear from 2027, so that is when partners will first see what the Strategy changes on the ground.
Outlook
As a Communication, the Strategy sets out policy direction without creating new legal obligations. Its practical effect will depend on the proposals and initiatives that follow, in particular the design of the Academy and the mandate of the EU Tourism Alliance. EVBB will follow these developments and contribute the experience of its projects and members to the discussion.
For now, nobody has to do anything new. The useful step is to keep watching, keep our project outputs ready to share, and be prepared to contribute once the Academy and the Alliance start asking for input.
Source: European Commission, Communication on the EU Sustainable Tourism Strategy, COM(2026) 777 final, 4 November 2026.