On November 17th-19th, the 2020 International Mountain Tourism Alliance Annual Conference opened in Guiyang. The Conference is concentrated on the theme of "The Path of Mountain Tourism Development in the Post-COVID World". During the annual conference, the participants focused on this major topic, and discuss depth in how to promote the revitalization and quality of mountain tourism after the pandemic, and provide thoughts guidance and practice support for global mountain tourism management and promotion of global tourism industry.

This Annual Conference is hosted by the International Mountain Tourism Alliance. UNWTO, WTTC, PATA, GTEF, WTA, WTCF, ASEAN-China Centre, WCCO and other well-know international organizations and associations provided powerful support.

I very much want to thank you for this opportunity that International Mountain Tourism Alliance has given UNWTO long-term partnership that we value to address you today on what are the challenges that we face currently with the biggest pandemic that we have faced in the history of international travel and how we can actually address those challenges from the mountain tourism side, and also enable the opportunities that actually have been brought up to us by this challenge that we’re facing. So if you allow me, I will share my screen very briefly with you.

Just to start by saying a little bit of what are the biggest numbers that we’re seeing at this moment, international tourist arrivals have declined by as much as 56% in the first five months of this year. Just to give you an idea of a caparison term, in the whole 2009, when we were facing the Global Economic Crisis, we had a that was only 4%.So this is how much the magnitude of this crisis impacting our sector. But another feature of this crisis is not only its magnitude. It’s also its global scale.For the first time, this is a situation that’s affecting travel and tourism all over the world. In the previous crisis like 9/11 or the SARS epidemic, we have seen that the focus have been on specific regions. But now, with COVID-19 for the first time, we are facing a challenge that is truly global in its nature.

So you can see, most of the regions have been impacted in a very similar way. Asia and the Pacific suffered the most because obviously it started to feel the impact of this pandemic earlier. But Europe followed very closely, since the fact that by mid-March, most of the European countries had closed their borders.The Americas, a little bit slower at this point.

If we look at little bit forward and with all the challenges that the situation offers in terms of doing any scenario planning or any actual forecast on where we might see international tourism evolving towards the end of the year.

In any case, this is a total huge impact in terms of international tourism arrivals. But most importantly and we always stress this, it’s a very important impact in terms of jobs. At the moment, UNWTO forecast at a hundred to a hundred and twenty million direct tourism jobs could be at risk in the tourism industry.And this is not taking into account all the indirect impacts that the tourism has in so many other areas. So for addressing the challenges that we’re facing, UNWTO has been working very strongly with the other UN agencies, with the private sector, and with the countries, its member states to actually try to mitigate the impact of the crisis and accelerate recovery.

We have set up a series of priorities that we think all countries and destination should consider when looking to recovery. Those include, the first one to provide liquidity and protect jobs.

The most valuable workers that we have at this moment are jeopardized by this crisis. We need to ensure that they do have income. That they continue to be there for when the sector recoveries. We also need to make sure that the sector which is made mostly of small and medium enterprises can actually survive through this situation.

The second point which is as we open, one of the key for confidence-building is safety and security, safety and security in terms of social protocols, in terms of health regulations, both at the destination and throughout the value chain of travel. Hospitality, transport, all the touch points of the consumer need to be taken care of. And they also need to be communicated. It’s very important that we are capable of communicating very clearly. What are the safety measures that are being put in place?

The third point is public-private collaboration for an efficient reopening. It is critical that the measures that the public health and tourism sectors put together be implemented by the private sector. So they need to be totally on board with those measures and they need to support them.

The fourth point which is a key point, as I mentioned before is the opening of borders with responsibility. We need to ensure that the measures are there. They need to be evidence-based and they need to actually address the level of risk. It’s very important that we protect health in the first place but also that we assure that we can restart our tourism sector.

That takes me to the 5th point which is the need for harmonization and coordination of travel protocols. International travel depends at this moment on how much countries are capable of coordinating their travel restrictions. How much they care capable of creating systems that allow for tracing of people in terms of the travel from the moment of their departure to the moment they get back home. 

The 6th point is to use technology in this challenging time to actually be able to improve our capacity, to manage the sector, to communicate with consumers, and to decrease costs as we face so many challenges.

And finally, the last one, is how can you use innovation and sustainability as the new normal. As we restart tourism, it’s very important to build back better. Better in a sense that we respect our environment, our cultural values, but also the communities that we visit.

We know how many challenges we were facing before the crisis in terms of managing tourism flows and numbers. So this is an opportunity to think a little bit how do we want the sector to actually develop in the next 20 years.

To compliment these priorities, UNWTO has also set a series of global guidelines to restart tourism. And those touch issues such as border management, how the private sector can actually implement safety protocols, air travel, hospitality, and I do invite you to come and visit the UNWTO website where you can find all these measures in detail.

They touch upon each of the points of the travel journey, from the moment where the consumer actually searches for the travel, where it is very important that all the information on health regulations, cancellation policies is available.Second step, when the traveler goes through the transport network, how he needs to behave? What kind of information he should be given? And also when he arrives at the destination to make sure that for example when we talk about mountain tourism and we talked about visiting a park that things like contactless payment and contactless buy of tickets can be in place.And in this regard, I think there’s a lot that we can learn from actually what is happening in Asia because Asia’s been at the front of technology in travel and I think this is a huge opportunity to actually in many parts of the world advance this agenda.

So when we look forward, the challenges and opportunities that we have in face of COVID-19 and linking it to specific to what brings us here today, which is mountain tourism, there is an important point which is the opportunities of the sustainability-oriented segments. Segments like rural tourism, nature tourism, and health tourism will be a priority and we’ll see a much higher growth in the months and years to come. So we do have an opportunity to make sure that mountain tourism benefits somehow for this new trends that we are facing and adapts to the challenges that we have.

So I would like to leave you with seven quick ideas of principles that we at UNWTO promote to ensure that the development of tourism specifically in mountain areas can actually contribute to a healthy and sustainable recovery.

The first one is the importance of knowing your customers. The use of big data is more and more common among the tourism stakeholders. But it is important that that view that is very common in the private sector can actually be enlarged to the public sector. We need to be able to target the consumers to understand what they want in this moment, to understand what they are concerned about. What would be important to build their confidence? So it is important to invest in data and in data management. 

The second point is how to empower local communities. The fact that we have seen how tourism affects societies takes us to believe that this is a huge opportunity to make sure that all the good things that communities have can be brought into the value chain of travel. Handicrafts, gastronomy, local flavors are really an opportunity for a new consumer who actually will value very much those values.

The third point is the importance of building strong governance models.And what do I mean by this? I mean that it is important that public sector at national level institutions, at local level, and all the players in the tourism industry can work together to have a structure that helps the destination to move forward but also to build resilience for the future. We need to work closer and closer together. 

And this takes me to the 4th point where it is the importance of having destination management organizations. For mountain tourism to thrive, we need to ensure that there is a structure in place that is responsible for all the components of tourism development, the planning, the management, the evaluation, the partnership, the consumer experience, the quality. We need to make sure that there is a set organization that manages those points and that it does so in a sustainable way.

The 5th point is the importance of local leaders. Today, we know that people go to a destination with a strong motivation either it is to be healthier, to feel more closer to nature, to know local cultures. So it is important that depending on what is the strong point of the destination, we can find who are the local leaders and who are the best providers that can take that experience forward.

If we have a strong experience that links the destination with a certain brand, with the image of this is the place where I will be able to connect with nature, this is the place where I’ll have the best experience of sports in my life, then we will have a winning destination.

The 6th point is the need to innovate. Innovating products, in products that take into account the new needs of consumers. We will see that probably the travel of the next month will be done by couples, will be done by smaller groups, will be done in proximity, so it is important to make sure that products are adopted to those new trends.

And finally, the 7th idea is sustainability. We need to identify in each of the mountain destinations what is tourism success. And it’s not about the numbers. It’s not about an increasing number of visitors. It’s about the right visitors. The right visitors that respect the environment, that respects the culture, that can spend on local products, and that can actually benefit and respect the communities and the nature that they visit. So this is a huge opportunity for us to rethink as we build back better tourism on what is success in terms of tourism.

In mountain destinations for their own brand are at the core of this decision. They won’t be any future for mountain tourism if we don’t play sustainability at the core of this development. Form this side, UNWTO is totally available to continue working with you to make sure that this agenda is moving forward in spite of the challenges that we face.We know this is one of the biggest crises that the tourism sector has ever faced but it has brought us together and it does provide us with an opportunity to rethink what we want to tourism sector to be as we move forward to the 2030 agenda of the United Nations.We have 10 years to make sure that tourism contributes to sustainable development goals and this is an opportunity to all together make sure that mountain tourism destinations can actually be part of that journey.

Once again, thank you very much for your attention. I look forward for seeing you in presence whenever possible and as soon as possible. And once again, from the World Tourism Organization, we send you greetings from Madrid.Thank you very much.