Tourism industries are largely labour intensive and provide jobs for many people. They include well trained professionals, but also a large number of workers with difficulties to find a job elsewhere, such as newcomers to the labour market (young people and migrants), women with family responsibilities who can only work part time, and workers with little qualification in general. Tourism provides working people with income and experience, and therefore contributes to their social inclusion and personal development.

On the other hand, the tourism sector suffers from shortage of workers with required minimum qualifications or skills. Because employment and working conditions often do not meet their expectations, people working in tourism tend to look for better jobs elsewhere and may, at the first opportunity, leave to take up more decent work elsewhere.

The world of work in tourism is generally not well-known because reliable data are missing. Only a handful of countries have meaningful statistics on employment in the tourism industries. Contributing to the improvement of methods of statistical data collection and better coverage of persons employed in tourism industries will provide reliable and consistent information on employment, occupational structure, qualifications, skills, working conditions, wages and remuneration, etc.

This is the area where, over the past years, UNWTO has been cooperating on with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) through an agreement in the area of employment and decent work in tourism. The work is being carried out jointly by the ILO Department of Statistics and the UNWTO Statistics Department.

One of the areas covered by the above agreement is the improvement of national methods of data collection of employment in the tourism industries. It is with that objective that the two organisations have undertaken different initiatives: the first of these has been the elaboration of this joint publication: "Sources and Methods: Labour Statistics. Employment in the Tourism Industries – Special Edition", which provides methodological descriptions of statistical series on employment, wages and hours of work in the tourism industries derived from various sources, as well as methods used by countries to compute the above variables.

The second of these initiatives is the design of some general orientations, grounded in a detailed questionnaire that builds on the first outcome. The publication "Measuring Employment in the Tourism Industries - Guide with Best Practices" provides some examples of best pratices of measuring employment in the tourism industries from countries that have demonstrated capacity to develop a comprehensive set of employment indicators.

The third initiative deals with testing the applicability of the Technical Guide in two case-study countries to better understand which of the set of ILO Decent Work Indicators could be produced in the context of tourism.

Tourism is an economic phenomenon concerning the movement of people to places outside their usual environment for either personal or business/professional purposes. As such, tourism has implications for the economy, for the natural and built environment, for the local population at the destination and for the visitors themselves. Due to these multiple impacts, UNWTO encourages an interdisciplinary approach in the formulation and implementation of national and sub-national tourism policies.

INRouTe adopts UNWTO's positionning of the United Nations international standards approved in 2008 (International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics 2008 and Tourism Satellite Account: Recommended Methodological Framework 2008) as the foundation for the measurement of tourism and sustainable development at the national, but also at the regional and local levels.

Tourism should thus be understood as a phenomenon that is territory-contingent, with flows and activities occurring unevenly across countries, regions, municipalities or any other territorial entity. The close link between tourism and territory exists not only because the natural or built territory is often the main tourism attraction (an exotic beach, a vibrant city), but also because the territory, and movements across it, largely condition tourism trips, the nature of the supply that caters to visitor consumption and, consequently, the relationship to potential welfare.

The Sixth International Tourism Forum for Parliamentarians and Local Authorities (Cebu/Philipines, 22-25 October 2008), organized by UNWTO and The Philippines national tourism administration, formally requested UNWTO to design guidelines for those (sub-national) regions where tourism plays a particularly relevant role. In addition, the TSA:RMF 2008 mentions that “there are various reasons for encouraging discussion on how the TSA can be adapted to the subnational level”. Also, the IRTS 2008 mentions that “increasingly, regional tourism authorities are interested in regional statistics and possibly some form of TSA at regional level as a means of providing useful indicators for tourism enterprises and organizations in identifying possible business opportunities, assessing the volume and intensity of tourism business and determining the extent to which private and public regional tourism networks and clusters are interconnected”.

To this purpose, UNWTO signed a cooperation agreement with the International Network on Regional Economics, Mobility and Tourism (INRouTe) —a non-profit association dedicated to advancing policy-oriented measurement and analysis of tourism in order to provide guidance to entities involved with regional and local tourism destinations. Through this agreement, INRouTe provides technical support to UNWTO. Central to this support is assistance in the development of a conceptual framework sufficiently robust for the sub-national measurement, monitoring, and analysis of tourism, so essential for designing policies that properly address today’s challenges and opportunities. Such a conceptual framework will be presented to UNWTO in the form of guidance documents. Based on this, UNWTO will design a set of general guidelines for the measurement of tourism from the sub-national perspective.

“Towards a Set of UNWTO Guidelines” (english) (french) (spanish) is the first in the A Closer Look at Tourism: Sub-national Measurement and Analysis series of guidance documents. It provides an overview of the INRouTe – UNWTO initiative, its objective, proposed recommendations and agenda for what is proposed as the first step to develop basic statistical information for regions and other sub-national territorial aggregations: the setup of a Regional Tourism Information System (R-TIS).

This will be crucial for a better measurement and understanding of domestic tourism flows and their economic contributions, an issue recurrently highlighted by several UNWTO Member States as being of utmost importance.

• Fourth International Conference on Sub-National Measurement and Economic Analysis of Tourism: Towards a Set of UNWTO Guidelines - MOVE 2015
  San Juan, Puerto Rico, 18 - 20 November 2015
• Third International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism MOVE 2013
  Medellín, Colombia, 6 - 7 November 2013
• Second International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism
  Bilbao, Spain, 27 - 29 October 2011
• First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism
  Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, 27 - 28 October 2009

• UNWTO & INRouTe workshop Subnational Tourism Measurement
  Venice, Italy, 22 November 2016
• II International Seminar on Regional Tourism: Moving towards a Regional TSA approach
  Venice, Italy, 9 - 10 October 2014
• First Seminar on Regional Tourism: Setting the Focus
  Venice, Italy, 5 - 7 July 2012

The Governance for the Tourism Sector Project took place during 2010-2011, in order to develop a strategic approach oriented at the construction of a governance structure for the tourism sector. The analytical framework and objectives were established based on the following:

1. Determining the space that governance occupies in the tourism sector (delimitation of its dimensions, measurement and evaluation of their magnitudes);
2. Formulating an operative definition of governance for the tourism sector; and
3. A strategic design centred on three specific perspectives:
   1. that of the institutional relations of the Secretariat with UN sister Organizations and other international organizations, Affiliate Members and other stakeholders that constitute the tourism sector in its international dimension,
   2. that of the National Tourism Administrations with the rest of stakeholders that constitute the respective national tourism sectors, and
   3. that of the national and subnational tourism administrations, to support and encourage patterns of performance geared towards increasing management efficiency in, principally, the following topics: statistics and economic evaluation of tourism; education and training; marketing strategies; risk and crisis management.

The project was carried out in two phases:

Phase 1. The objective was to identify, analyse, establish and evaluate the state of the art in matters of tourism governance, as well as to identify the achievements and components that can contribute to a system of governance for tourism, while explaining and assessing their potential reach and impacts within the Secretariat and for National Tourism Administrations.

Phase 2. Aimed at generating a proposal for a strategic management plan.