Building on a success story

Date: 07/03/1996

It is one of Europe's largest industries and one of its biggest money-spinners. Yet the EU has virtually no policy on tourism.

Apart from a series of directives on package holidays and timeshare properties designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous cowboys, EU initiatives to promote tourism have been thin on the ground.

The European Commission wants to remedy this by writing tourism into the EU treaty at the forthcoming Intergovernmental Conference, but member states have so far shown little enthusiasm for the idea.

EU governments have shown no such reticence in pursuing policies designed to support and promote other key European industries from cars to information technology. So why should tourism, which accounts for a massive one in every eight jobs in the Union, be any different?

Does an industry have to be ailing and virtually stricken before member states will agree to work together to help it?

Surely it is as important to coordinate efforts to promote Europe's most successful industries - helping them become even more successful - as it is to step in when a particular sector comes under pressure.

“What about subsidiarity?” opponents of EU involvement in the industry are bound to cry.

Their concerns are understandable. As representatives of the tourism industry themselves point out, it is not more legislation that is needed but a concerted policy to help the industry to help itself.

But many in the tourism sector have nevertheless given a cautious welcome to Commissioner Christos Papoutsis' call for the revised Maastricht Treaty to contain a reference to the industry.

For, as many point out, Europe “exists as a concept in the minds of overseas travellers...so we need to promote it as a single travel destination”.

While it is true that there are other, more pressing priorities which must be addressed by EU governments at the IGC, they would be wrong to overlook the needs of an industry which generates massive amounts of money and is responsible for so many jobs in Europe.

With the volume of travel expected to double over the next decade, the Union cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the need for member states to coordinate their efforts to compete for a bigger share of this expanding market.

EU governments constantly emphasise the need to tackle the scourge of unemployment.

Given the huge number of people already employed in this sector, and the potential offered by the predicted surge in demand, concerted EU-wide action to build on the tourism success story would surely be one concrete way of achieving this.