The Pact for Next Tourism Generation Skills (PANTOUR) is a consortium that seeks to boost innovation through cooperation to develop activities, strengthen partnerships and produce resources to implement the Blueprint for Sectoral Skills Development in Tourism in Europe. PANTOUR is composed by a transnational alliance of 13 partners from the vocational training, life-long learning and higher education landscapes, and all the tourism industry sector representatives from all over Europe: CEHAT (Spain), Ruraltour (European), Federturismo Confindustria (Italy), VIMOSZ (Hungary); ETOA (European); Landurlaub Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany); Gestlabor Hostelería (Spain), DSFT (Germany), TU Dublin (Ireland), BUas (Netherlands), University Of The Aegean (Greece), SAMK University (Finland) and ZRI (Bulgaria). The knowledge and background of the partnership acquired in the Next Tourism Generation Alliance (NTG) project (2017-2022) will provide the necessary tools and conditions to successfully implement the Blueprint from the first moment, thus being able to deliver immediate reactive response. The consortium aims especially at designing innovative and cooperative solutions to address skills needs in the all the tourism ecosystem, with the development of outputs such us: the Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor, the Skills Lab, a Resource Books for Trainers, the implementation of the NSRGs, a Skills Strategy Plan for 2026-2036, among others. With the exploitation of its outputs, PANTOUR seeks to benefit job seekers, unemployed and employed workers from the industry, employers and SMEs, dedicating a special attention in reskilling and upskilling the workforce on future skills needs after the Covid-19 impacts in the industry. Public and private training institutions will benefit from new innovative content and teaching methods on core skills. The number of people benefiting from this proposal will be over 10 million that work across the tourism sector in Europe.

EU rural and remote areas demonstrate a wide range of qualities, while facing a unique set of challenges. To this end, EC put forward a “Long Term Vision for Rural Areas”, identifying specific challenges and opportunities, and proposing a Rural Action Plan. A major challenge is the diversification of economic activities beyond the traditional agriculture-farming-forestry sectors, as enabler for stimulating economic growth. Evidently, tourism could become an anchor for economic development of rural and remote areas. Motivated from the above considerations, TOURAL will focus on cultural & creative tourism as drivers for sustainable development, paying at the same time a premium to the EC Tourism Transition Pathway requirements, within the context of smart multi-destination and multi-dimensional tourism offerings empowered by macro-regional tourism cooperation and integrated local value-chains. TOURAL proposes a model to support the touristic development of participating rural regions, balancing the growth of their urban clusters with the untapped growth potential of their remote and rural grid cells. Our modelling approach will be multi-dimensional in terms of addressing complementary tourism verticals/niche sectors (underwater cultural & nature heritage tourism, cultural & creative tourism, cultural science tourism, silver tourism); participatory in terms of co-designing policy pathways and tourism offerings/services, co-creating business models and tourism products, and co-validating small-scale tourism services implementations; and integrated in terms of joint planning and business development with integrated value-chains, policymaking and cross-border cooperation, at macro-regions level. Our scope of interventions includes 3 regions from the Adriatic-Ionian macro-region (Italy, Croatia, Greece), and 3 regions from the Black Sea Basin (Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine).

The Next Tourism Generation Alliance project will establish a BluePrint for Sectoral Skills Development in Tourism to provide concrete innovative and highly relevant Skills Products and Tools for improving the relationship between Industry and Education Providers in the Tourism sector and respond to skills needs. The project will develop, deliver and test the new Next Tourism Generation (NTG) Skills Products for professionals, trainers, students, university tourism departments, local authorities, companies to respond to the fast changing and increasing skills gaps in digital, green and social skills sets and Specialist Sub-Sector Tourism Skills such as Destination Management, Blue Economy Tourism, Heritage Interpretation, Gastronomy and Collaborative Economy provision with appropriate, flexible learning and training methods to enhance skills responses and training provision to ensure a more competitive, sustainable and contemporary and authentic visitor experience. The Blue print strategy will directly assist destinations, enterprises and higher education institutions to support regional strategies and plans in employment and sustainable development. The new modules and learning methods will be integrated into the current European VET system, providing a standard benchmark for sustainable tourism management, digital and technological innovation and social skills in tourism. The consortia is a multi-disciplinary partnership which comprises 14 partners: 7 Industry Partners and Tourism Sector Representatives(Federturismo, UnionCamere; Eurogites; IHK Academy Chamber of Commerce; People 1st; VIMOS; CEHAT); 6 Universities (Dublin Institute of Technology, University of Sopron, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Alicante University, NHTV Breda Applied Sciences University, Varna University) and ATLAS-Europe, the Association of Tourism Lecturers and Students in Tourism in Europe.