Representatives from more than 70 countries will gather at the Llotja de Mar Barcelona, on October 26 and 27, for the Future of Tourism World Summit congress, a meeting that aims to be a space for reflection, debate, and generation of the future of international tourism. The ultimate goal: the signing of the Barcelona Declaration, a document that will lay the foundations for a new global tourism model, more innovative, ethical, and sustainable.
Future of Tourism World Summit, organized by the Advanced Leadership and INCYDE foundations of the Spanish Chambers of Commerce, has the explicit support of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), with the presidency of its Secretary-General, Zurab Pololikashvili. Tourism Ministers and Secretaries of State from some twenty countries, entrepreneurs, mayors, representatives of international organizations, and more than 150 international speakers will participate in the summit.
The president of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce, Josep Lluís Bonet, highlights how important it is for Barcelona to return to the center of the global tourism scene, with a congress that will become a space for reflection, debate, and generation of new proposals for the recovery, modernization, and reinvention of tourism.
With the participation of prominent international speakers, this world summit aims to find solutions to the situation in which the tourism sector worldwide has been left after covid-19. The UNWTO Secretary-General, Zurab Pololikashvili, recently stated that this event is an opportunity to reconsider tourism development, ensuring a fairer distribution of the benefits generated by this activity and moving towards a transition that leads to a carbon-neutral and more socially resilient tourism economy.
The ultimate goal: the signing of the Barcelona Declaration, a document that will lay the foundations for a new global tourism model, more innovative, ethical, and sustainableThis necessarily involves promoting intra-regional collaboration, hence the purpose of this event. Not in vain,the tourism sector represented almost 11% of global GDP. But the shock of the pandemic is still noticeable. According to UNWTO data, from January to May of this year, international tourist arrivals were 85% lower than in 2019 (and 65% less than in 2020), with 460 million arrivals.
In Spain, the panorama is not much different. From January to June of this year, Spain received 5.41 million international tourists, which represents only 14.2% of the 38 million visitors registered in the first half of 2019, a pre-pandemic year.
With this panorama and the misgivings about the international economic recovery, 45% of UNWTO experts still believe that international tourism will not return to 2019 levels until 2024 or later, while 43% predict that recovery will arrive in 2023.
On October 26 and 27, the Llotja de Mar will be the chosen setting to analyze this situation and conspire to remedy it. Therefore, during the Future of Tourism World Summit, and to be able to fulfill the final commitment, an international call for 300 leaders will be made. These leaders will be trained virtually and will commit to carrying out ten communication acts (in-person or digital) about what they learn at the summit during the following twelve months in their areas of influence.
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