Stakeholder Requirements and Governance for the European Data Space for Tourism

As a part of the 2020 European Strategy for Data, the European Commission has set into motion the creation of interoperable domain-specific data spaces that, in the future, will constitute a common European Data Space and realize the vision for single market for data within Europe. Given the significant impact of tourism on the European economy, the development of a European Tourism Data Space (ETDS) is an important part of this vision. Therefore, preparatory actions for the ETDS (a decentralized ecosystem for the secure exchange of data and data assets among public and non-public tourism actors and other industries) are underway. Digital transformation, seamless access to information, and network effects associated with the ETDS are expected to empower innovation, ensuring the European tourism industry’s competitiveness in a global data-agile world.

To ensure that the ETDS meets the needs of European tourism stakeholders, this applied research employs a bottom-up approach to examine tourism experts’ opinions regarding ETDS's perceived value, desirable features, governance approaches, and business models. Additionally, we explore the incentives for stimulating ETDS participation among public and private tourism actors.

A data space is “an infrastructure that enables data transactions between different data ecosystem parties based on the governance framework of the data space [1, p.5]. Development of a data space must balance the technical requirements (e.g., APIs, network protocols, hardware) with governance approaches (e.g., business, organizational, and operational agreements, and policies) [1, 2]. The ETDS’ emphasis on data sovereignty and trust, decentralized architectures, and collaborative data space governance will be fundamental for inciting trust among participants, promoting cooperation, innovation, and fostering the development of new data-informed tourism policies, services and products that increase sustainability and competitiveness of the European tourism sector.

By maintaining control over their data assets, data space participants may decide when and what type of data assets to share, and under what terms. The data space governing body will provide the regulatory framework and guidance for these data exchanges. Since most public data spaces follow the decentralized multi-actor framework, the literature advocates for collaborative, alliance-based governance [3, 4]. The development, maintenance, and enforcement of interoperability principles, policies, and practices, as well as the coordination of the inter-stakeholder interaction is overseen by a collective body representing key stakeholder groups. In the European data space reality, the governing body typically consists of the boards (supervisory, advisory boards, and a council) in charge of the strategic and tactical level decisions, complemented by the working groups responsible for accession and certification, maintenance of innovations, technical implementation support, communication, and education [2]. The final composition of the governance framework must reflect the domain-specific aspects of a sectoral data space (such as the ETDS) and represent the interests and needs of both public and private sector actors. Therefore, the ETDS design must ensure a balanced representation of diverse tourism stakeholders’ needs. This calls for a closer exploration and evaluation of those key governance features – a task undertaken by this study.

A modified, two-round Delphi study was conducted from June 5–July 7, 2023, to identify consensus opinions among European tourism stakeholders about the critical success factors required for a sustainable ETDS. The sampling frame consisted of 261 tourism stakeholders of different operational scope (e.g., multinational, national, regional, local), organizational type (e.g., private enterprises, NGOs, DMOs, research institutes) and size, who previously declared interest in the research. During the first round of the Delphi study, tourism stakeholders were presented with open-ended questions soliciting their opinions about the following themes: 1) value creation, 2) key features of the ETDS, 3) motivations for participation in the ETDS, 4) EDTS governing body, 5) data quality control measures, and 6) ETDS business models. The expert (n = 77) responses to the open-ended questions were summarized by the research team into 120 statements. In the second round of the Delphi survey, the same European tourism experts (n = 55) were asked to indicate their level of agreement with each statement using five-point Likert scales. The agreement was used as the criteria for evaluating the Delphi survey results following Barnes and Mattson [5], where consensus for an item is indicated by 100 percent agreement among respondents, and majority agreement is characterized by at least 70 percent.

Table 1 presents a summary of the number of unique statements corresponding to each EDTS governance theme, and the aggregate mean level of agreement for the statements for each theme. Results show that there was a moderate level of agreement among the sample of tourism experts with the statements regarding ETDS data quality control measures, value creation, and key features. There is weak agreement regarding statements concerning the governing body of the ETDS, the ideal business models, and how to incentivize participation in the ETDS.

Table 2 presents the four most agreed upon statements per above presented ETDS governance theme, as rated by the sample of tourism experts. These statements highlight the general attitudes, opinions, and priorities of European tourism experts. Importantly, there is strong evidence of a shared vision for an easy-to-use tourism data space that fosters data standardization, enables benchmarking, and evidence-based decision making

The results also confirm the ETDS's potential to create value for a variety of tourism stakeholders. However, accessibility of the data-based solutions (e.g., dashboards, visualizations, and analytics) will be crucial for conveying these advantages to broader tourism audience and engaging them in the data space. Data asset accessibility should be incentivized by ETDS business model(s) and facilitate a variety of transactions between participants, including both free and restricted (e.g., paid) access to data. However, results also indicate only mild agreement as to the ideal business model (freemium access).

Experts agree on the importance of open access data for the purpose of research. While indicating the need for European-level governance, there was no consensus on if an existing EU-level entity should be home for the ETDS.

This study confirmed tourism stakeholders’ interest in a common European data space for facilitating data exchange and promoting data-driven tourism solutions. While we identified potential governance and business models that would meet the diverse needs of European tourism stakeholders, it is also clear from the analysis that the ETDS is challenged with finding the ideal combination of solutions to create fair and equitable opportunities. Future research will investigate the ideal governance structure (e.g., private vs. non-profit) and roles of the ETDS governing body. The Delphi study has identified numerous potential business model options for the ETDS (including funding and revenue generation). However, it is apparent that there is not a one-size-fits-all option that can meet the needs of all tourism stakeholders. This suggests that in order to achieve adoption among European tourism stakeholders, the ETDS must employ a variety of mechanisms to incentivize and motivate stakeholder participation while ensuring inclusivity for a variety of tourism stakeholders based on both financial and accessibility by design.