The Pact for Next Tourism Generation Skills (PANTOUR) is a consortium that seeks to boost innovation through cooperation to develop activities, strengthen partnerships and produce resources to implement the Blueprint for Sectoral Skills Development in Tourism in Europe. PANTOUR is composed by a transnational alliance of 13 partners from the vocational training, life-long learning and higher education landscapes, and all the tourism industry sector representatives from all over Europe: CEHAT (Spain), Ruraltour (European), Federturismo Confindustria (Italy), VIMOSZ (Hungary); ETOA (European); Landurlaub Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Germany); Gestlabor Hostelería (Spain), DSFT (Germany), TU Dublin (Ireland), BUas (Netherlands), University Of The Aegean (Greece), SAMK University (Finland) and ZRI (Bulgaria). The knowledge and background of the partnership acquired in the Next Tourism Generation Alliance (NTG) project (2017-2022) will provide the necessary tools and conditions to successfully implement the Blueprint from the first moment, thus being able to deliver immediate reactive response. The consortium aims especially at designing innovative and cooperative solutions to address skills needs in the all the tourism ecosystem, with the development of outputs such us: the Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor, the Skills Lab, a Resource Books for Trainers, the implementation of the NSRGs, a Skills Strategy Plan for 2026-2036, among others. With the exploitation of its outputs, PANTOUR seeks to benefit job seekers, unemployed and employed workers from the industry, employers and SMEs, dedicating a special attention in reskilling and upskilling the workforce on future skills needs after the Covid-19 impacts in the industry. Public and private training institutions will benefit from new innovative content and teaching methods on core skills. The number of people benefiting from this proposal will be over 10 million that work across the tourism sector in Europe.

Rural and remote areas (RRA) are rich in cultural heritage, but many also suffer from socio-economic problems such as an ageing population, out-migration, and low incomes. Cultural and creative tourism (CCT) could help address these problems by creating sustainable jobs and investment, but three key challenges and associated knowledge gaps must be overcome: (1) place-specific business models that suit different types of cultural heritage and community needs must be created; (2) tourism development must be balanced and sustainable; (3) policies at different scales should support cooperation between RRA. CROCUS addresses these key challenges by: (a) generating knowledge about which CCT business models are most appropriate for different types of heritage and rural areas; (b) creating eight cross-border living labs in which sustainable CCT business models will be prototyped (16 in total); (c) developing macro-regional and cross-border policy scenarios for each of the four EU macro-regions (Baltic Sea, Adriatic and Ionian, Alpine, and Danube); and (d) synthesising knowledge and experience from the project to create tools and resources that RRA across Europe and beyond can use to develop sustainable and inclusive CCT in the future. CROCUS will achieve this through its ambitious multi-scalar research design, innovative cross-border living labs, and participatory processes of sustainable business model prototyping. The consortium brings together leading scholars and practitioners that have extensive experience with cross-border tourism development projects, stakeholder engagement, and policy analysis. It will be the first systematic study of different types of cross-border CCT cooperation in RRA. The impact of CROCUS will be to increase sustainable and inclusive CCT and cross-border cooperation in RRA across Europe, thus unleashing the potential of cultural heritage as a driver of sustainable innovation.

Tourism and hospitality (T&H) make up over 10% of the European economy and 11.7% of employment. Many of the 13 million employees in the EU are from marginalised groups: women (54%), migrants (16% ) and youth (30%) (ILO, 2022). However, staff turnover and vacancies are high, with 1.2 million job vacancies (11%) in the EU. Many T&H workers are in non-standard forms of work, including platform work. This is detrimental for employees: a decent work deficit, lack of social protection, increased precarity and vulnerability, and increased in-work poverty (European Parliament 2021). Furthermore, algorithmic management impacts negatively on these workers. Generally considered as self-employed, platform workers risk exploitation, forced labour, mistreatment, and sexual abuse. Their precarity is increased due to legal, knowledge and financial obstacles they face in representation and social dialogue structures. FUTOURWORK will investigate how all T&H workers can be included in social dialogue, and understand and tackle the challenges of the associated distributional costs. While acknowledging a variety of social dialogue arrangements and processes, reflecting different historical, economic and sociopolitical backgrounds, this project researches the changes in the new world of work, examples of best practice and identifies common issues that can be tackled at a European level. Using an intersectional gender-sensitive approach FUTOURWORK will use quantitative and qualitative techniques including surveys, mapping, interviews, story -telling and multi-stakeholder learning dialogues. FUTOURWORK will produce an index that can be used by industry to benchmark their workers well-being. Workers stories will be collected and a documentary produced to enhance public understanding. We will develop an observatory to integrate the information produced and as a platform for dialogue for workers, legal and social dialogue organisations and employers.