Recently, the "2023 World Tourism Alliance·Xianghu Dialogue" was held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. During the meeting, Tom Jenkins, CEO of the European Tourism Association, shared his views on the topic of "staying sustainable: a common challenge for Europe and its travelers".

Here is the full text of the speech:

When discussing sustainable development, we need to focus on both environmental crises facing Europe today and other issues of social sustainable development, which are particularly important in the development of tourism. Among them, overtourism is a topic that needs more attention. In many European countries, tourism is considered a controversial topic. Excessive tourists beyond the local environmental capacity will bring tremendous pressure on local natural and cultural landscapes, leading to a series of problems such as the destruction of tourism activities and environmental pollution. This situation is particularly evident in tourist destinations.

For the European tourism industry, over the past three years, we have all witnessed a huge collapse in the tourism industry. International tourism, including travel between EU member states, has been greatly reduced. For example, in Italy, only Italian tourists were present during that period. During that time, everyone relied more on domestic tourism. Fortunately, like other parts of the world, European tourism has finally emerged from the catastrophe and is currently experiencing a remarkable recovery. The current recovery situation is quite impressive, especially in 2023, benefiting from the global economic recovery, the European tourism industry has ushered in opportunities for growth. Turkey and Spain are now the two most popular European destinations mainly due to the resumption of travel between EU countries. Europeans are quickly returning to the Mediterranean to enjoy the long-awaited warm coast. In addition, benefiting from the strong growth of the US dollar exchange rate, US tourism demand has recovered quite quickly, which has also provided impetus for the recovery of European tourism.

Currently, the recovery of European tourism is also inseparable from China as China has always been one of the three major source markets. For a period of time, a large number of Chinese inbound tourist routes to Europe were canceled, resulting in a loss of about 110 billion euros in tourist income for Europe. The impact of this income reduction on the European economy is self-evident.

We must obtain clear understanding of the contribution of long-distance travel to the tourism industry. Most of the expenses generated by tourists are during long-distance trips such as China to Europe and Europe to China. More consumption is experienced by tourists during their travel process. This requires tourism destinations to take measures to protect the enthusiasm of long-distance travelers.

Of course, if tourism wants to achieve sustainable development, it must attach importance to carbon reduction issues. The 21st UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) proposed a target of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, but we have only achieved 15% so far. Therefore, the EU Commission has introduced laws and regulations for the aviation industry that require 70% of fuel to be sustainable fuel by 2050. At the same time, a green directive was issued requiring the selection of 330 sustainable development projects to be screened and eliminating pseudo-green sustainable projects.

For the tourism industry, it contributes to about 10% of global GDP share but only about 8% in carbon reduction contributions. For European tourism, more environmentally friendly measures must be taken such as measuring their carbon footprint and focusing on the effectiveness of carbon emission reduction measures so that more consumers can participate in carbon reduction efforts.