Preparing Leisure and Tourism for Tomorrow

This article was written for Uncover magazine – From Global to Ground (10th edition). You can read the full magazine here. 

Author: Corné Dijkmans is Research and Business Innovation Manager at Academy for Tourism at BUas. 

The Leisure, Tourism and Hospitality (LTH) sector is one of Europe's largest employers, with over ten  million people working across its ecosystem, from tiny guesthouses to major international airports, from festival & event organisers to online travel platforms. It is a sector that touches almost every dimension of everyday life: how we move, how we connect with other cultures, how communities earn their income, and increasingly, how we think about the environmental and social footprint of our choices as travellers.

Yet this same sector entered the 2020s in a state of disruption. COVID-19 devastated it almost overnight, wiping out jobs and revenues that took years to recover. The digital transition had already been reshaping how leisure & travel is bought and sold, but the pandemic compressed a decade of change into two years. At the same time, the urgency of the climate crisis and the EU's Green Deal began placing entirely new expectations on businesses and their workers. And through all of this, one uncomfortable truth kept surfacing: the people working in leisure and tourism (and the institutions training them) were not adequately equipped for the world that was arriving.

This is the problem that the PANTOUR project sets out to address. Not with a quick fix, but with a sustained, Europe-wide investment in the skills the sector actually needs.

What is PANTOUR aiming for?
The four-year PANTOUR project (Pact for Next Tourism Generation Skills) brings together leisure, hospitality & tourism employers, industry associations and universities from ten countries, along with transnational sector associations, to map digital, green, and social skills gaps in a European context. This is the first time this has been done at this scale, with solutions actively implemented. It aligns with the European Transition Pathway strategy, which calls on sectors, businesses and institutions to commit to upskilling and reskilling on sustainability and digitalisation. Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas) leads the project’s research and communication activities. In this role, BUas sits at the analytical and communicative core of PANTOUR, producing the evidence base and translating it into insights for practitioners, policy-makers, employers and educators across Europe.

The skills gap: bigger than it looks
What exactly do we mean when we speak of ‘skills gaps in leisure and tourism’? The sector is sometimes caricatured as ‘low-skill and high-turnover‘, a place people pass through rather than where they build careers in. PANTOUR challenges that perception head-on. In reality, leisure and tourism is an extraordinarily complex ecosystem. It spans accommodation, food and beverage, transport, cultural attractions, events, destination management, and increasingly, digital platforms and the collaborative economy. Each of these areas is being reshaped by three major forces: digitalisation, the sustainability transition, and broader social/cultural change.

PANTOUR structures its skills agenda around three interconnected skills sets: digital, green and social.

Digital skills are perhaps the most visible pressure points. Even small tourism businesses, from local tour operators to event organisers, are now expected to manage online distribution, work with data, navigate AI-driven booking platforms, and engage customers across multiple digital channels. Yet for many workers and SMEs, especially in less-urbanised regions, even basic digital competencies remain underdeveloped. Skills in data management, augmented reality, and AI systems are no longer futuristic; they are becoming operational realities. As a result, the gap between what is needed and what the current workforce can offer continues to widen.

Green skills are where PANTOUR intersects most directly with the sustainability transition. Tourism has a significant environmental footprint, from transport-related emissions to energy and water use in hospitality, and waste generated by visitor flows. At the same time, the EU Green Deal is rapidly reshaping the regulatory landscape. Businesses increasingly need workers who understand sustainability reporting, circular practices, low-carbon service design, and how to communicate these efforts to a more environmentally conscious traveller. Crucially, green skills are not just a niche for specialists: they must be embedded across all roles, from a housekeeper dealing with linen and cleaning agents, to a destination manager designing visitor flow strategies that reduce pressure on fragile ecosystems.

Social skills might seem less urgent than digitalisation or implementing sustainable practices, but they are just as critical. In a sector built on human experience, the ability to communicate across cultures, show empathy, solve problems creatively, and collaborate in diverse teams is foundational. Paradoxically, as digital interfaces take over more interactions, the human moments that remain become more, not less, important. The emotional intelligence and intercultural competence of a frontline worker is often what turns a satisfactory visit into a memorable one.

These three skills sets do not operate in isolation. A sustainable destination depends on professionals who can interpret energy data (digital), implement waste reduction practices (green), and engage communities and visitors in ways that build local pride rather than resentment (social).

Turning insights into action
Understanding skills gaps is useful. Building the infrastructure to address them continuously is transformational. This is where PANTOUR's practical design matters.

At the heart of this design is the Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor (SSIM), developed under the leadership of BUas. Rather than a one-time study, it is designed as a ‘living’ methodology. It provides a flexible methodology toolkit (usable at local, regional or national level) that allows stakeholders to continuously track emerging skills needs, identify shifts in occupational profiles, and adapt training accordingly. Data and insights can be compared across countries, giving European policy-makers a clear picture of where the sector's human capital needs are heading.

Feeding into the SSIM are the National and Regional Skills Partnerships in every country, connecting employers, training providers, and public authorities at the ground level — precisely the ‘triple helix’ collaboration that makes skills policy actually work in practice, rather than remaining an abstract idea in a Brussels context only.

For practitioners and training providers, PANTOUR produces concrete resources: the first European Tourism Skills Lab, Skills Training Programmes for digital, green and social skills, a Resource Book for Trainers and Educators, updated Occupational Profiles, and a comprehensive Skills Strategy Plan for 2026-2036. The last is particularly significant: it offers the leisure & tourism sector a horizon from which job roles will grow, which ones will transform, and which ones may disappear, giving educators and companies enough time to adapt curricula and career pathways.

PANTOUR and broad prosperity
Leisure, tourism and hospitality have the potential to contribute to broad prosperity, but only when the sector is supported by the right skills. In regions often overlooked by mainstream development, such as rural areas, coastal communities, cultural heritage sites and outermost regions, tourism can either bring opportunity and prosperity or drive extraction and degradation. The difference lies for an important part in the capabilities of the workforce.

Green skills help reduce environmental impact. Social and cultural competences ensure that tourism strengthens rather than erodes local identity. Digital skills allow small and medium-sized enterprises to compete, keeping economic value within communities instead of losing it to global platforms. In this way, skills are not just an individual asset, but a key driver for achieving more inclusive, digital and sustainable forms of tourism, leisure and hospitality.

Through its role in PANTOUR, BUas positions itself as a driver of this transformation, linking skills development to the broader goal of creating a more resilient and equitable tourism, leisure and hospitality sector across Europe.

More information
For all results of this project about skills development in leisure & tourism, please visit https://nexttourismgeneration.eu/pantour