Improving sustainability of tourism SMEs through knowledge transfer, international cooperation and multistakeholder engagement

2026-07-22

Tourism is one of the major economic activities in the European Union with a high impact on economic growth, employment and social development and, thus, it is a powerful means to pursue broader EU employment and growth objectives. The competitiveness of the European tourism industry is closely linked to its sustainability, which is understood as environmental, economic and socio-cultural aspects of tourism development. Achieving sustainable tourism development brings numerous benefits derived from the competitive advantage provided by cost savings and the improvement of the quality of the offer. In this sense, to achieve sustainability and improve competitiveness, TOURISME aims at fostering SMEs’ capacities and skills to explore and uptake solutions through a reinforced transnational and cross-sectoral collaboration amongst tourism SMEs and operators from different sectors in Spain, Italy, and France. The project will address companies covering different sectors of the tourism industry, including coastal tourism, but also natural and cultural tourism and tourism linked to public events (sports, festivals, etc.). More specifically, TOURISME pursues the following objectives: - To design and implement trans-national and cross-sectoral support scheme including capacity building knowledge transfer and scaling-up activities to enable sustainable growth of SMEs in the tourism sector. - To support uptake of innovative solutions for sustainable tourism. - To support participation of SMEs in certification schemes. In the first stage of the project, a knowledge base will be created in order to map, analyses and draft a compendium of best practices and certifications to then design a transnational and cross-sectoral support schemes that will be implemented later on. At the final stage, a monitoring system of SME’s sustainability improvements will be set up and finally the sustainability results will be evaluated.

Spain, Belgium, Italy, France, Cyprus

2026-02-15