During the European Tourism Forum meeting in Malta last Thursday and Friday, the European Commission unveiled a road map to implement the main actions set out in its communication of 30 June on “Europe, the world’s No 1 tourist destination”.

The road map sets out the action that the Commission will take in the short and medium term, designates the key actors for each of them and proposes a timetable by when they should be completed. For example, the Commission will be organising working groups to assess the possibility of increasing the access of SMEs from the tourist sector to new technologies (eg access to the online travel market), to launch a call for tenders (2011) to set up a web-based platform to facilitate exchanges on supply and demand between EU member states in the low season and to launch consultations leading to the drafting of a strategy paper to develop sustainable coastal and marine tourism.

Tourism has a significant role to play in the EU’s economy. According to the Commission, there are 1.8 million companies in the tourism sector, including many SMEs. EU tourism provides jobs for 5.2 per cent of the labour force and generates more than five per cent of the EU’s GDP. To allow Europe to keep its position as the world’s number one tourist destination, the Commission intends to develop cooperation with the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries. The potential growth in tourism from these countries is particularly high, it says, due to a growing middle class that is “eager to travel”.

And the latest available data backs up this view. According to the Commissioner responsible for tourism, Antonio Tajani, arrivals from Brazil (+46 per cent), from China (+19 per cent) and from Russia (+18 per cent) have risen markedly in the second half of 2010 by comparison with the same period in 2009. This is a sign of a recovery in the European tourism sector as a whole, despite this year’s temporary ban on flights when the volcano in Iceland erupted.

The Commission sees China as being of particular interest, given that the number of Chinese tourists choosing foreign destinations (currently around 50 million) is expected to double over the next five years, and it intends to improve cooperation with China in particular in the area of visas.

One of the ideas that Tajani floated in Malta was to facilitate organised group trips by issuing a single visa to a group leader, who would be responsible for the travellers on his or her list.