Google helps tourism recovery

The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and Google will work together and lead global tourism’s recovery.  With more destinations looking to restart tourism, health tourism and medical tourism, the new partnership will focus on harnessing the power of innovation, education, data and market intelligence to drive sustainable and inclusive recovery.

 The new partnership builds on past cooperation between UNWTO and Google.

The organisations will host training sessions for destination management organisations, using a new capacity building curriculum developed by Google. The sessions will help destinations to switch to digital, with the training adapted to reflect the specific circumstances and challenges each destination currently faces.

The new capacity building curriculum will also complement existing joint initiatives, and includes a data sharing agreement for Google’s Travel Insights to power a portion of the UNWTO’s tourism recovery tracker.

A tourism accelerator programme, designed by Google in partnership with UNWTO, will also be scaled up globally. A pilot programme launched across Europe, Middle East and Africa in 2020 demonstrated the value of working with policymakers to put digital at the heart of their tourism recovery plans, and the benefits of up-skilling destination management organisations so they can make effective use of data and market intelligence.

Travel Insights offers destinations insights and tools to reach global travellers at every stage of their journey, from dreaming about a trip to booking flights and hotels to exploring local businesses. Countries that have used the services include Indonesia, Taiwan and Singapore.

UNWTO and Google will also collaborate on joint research projects related to tourism.