On a Thursday morning in a hotel in Spain, the sustainability coordinator is looking at an approved sustainability plan and wondering whether her team has the skills to actually deliver it. In Athens, a tour operator is interviewing a new generation of tour guides who will need to deal with group dynamics across several cultures in one single afternoon. In Dublin, a destination marketing manager is looking at an AI-generated itinerary on her screen and asking: does anyone on my team actually know how to evaluate this?

These are everyday situations of the European tourism and hospitality sector, and for the past four years they have been the foundation on which the PANTOUR project has done its work.

 

As the PANTOUR project (2022-2026) is approaching its closing, this is a good moment to look back at what the impact of the Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor, developed by Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUas), has produced and what it leaves behind for the people doing skills work in the sector every day.

 

The problem we set out to solve

Skills assessment in tourism and hospitality has long been fragmented. Different countries measure different things, in different ways, at different intervals. Meanwhile, three transformations (green, digital, and social) keep reshaping what a “competent” and “skilled” workforce actually means in practice. The Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor was designed to do something concrete about this; to build a method other people could pick up and use.

 

The Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor

One of the main and first outputs of this project is the Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor (SSIM), a flexible toolkit that any country, region, or destination can use to identify, assess, and monitor skills needs over time. The SSIM is a flexible methodology that combines five complementary tools: secondary data analysis, an online questionnaire, expert interviews, best-practice analysis, and focus groups. Users can pick the combination that fits their resources, their scale, and the question they actually need to answer.

 

What makes the SSIM useful is partly what it deliberately doesn’t do. It doesn’t set fixed standards. Instead, it offers a shared way of asking the questions, so that results from a destination in Finland can sit next to results from a region in Italy and the comparison actually means something.

 

Behind that flexibility sits a clear foundation: skills intelligence is only as good as the people gathering it. The SSIM is therefore designed to be operated by a National or Regional Skills Partnership, a body of stakeholders from industry, education, social partners, and government, rather than a single research team working in isolation. The methodology is continuous by design, because skills needs in this sector change faster than five-year reports can keep up with.

 

SSIM: Ten countries, two cycles, one growing picture

The SSIM has been put to work in the past 4 years in 10 European countries, each producing a Country Skills Profile Report that brings together tourism employment context, current skills gaps, projected future needs, training provision, and concrete recommendations for the sector and its educators.

 

The first round, published in 2024, drew on a European survey with 873 respondents and more than 100 expert interviews with directors, heads of department, and entrepreneurs across the industry. The picture that emerged was coherent: digital fluency gaps almost everywhere; sustainability skills moving from “nice to have” to operationally critical; and social skills (the ‘human interface’) turning out to be among the hardest to teach but among the most important for the industry.

 

In 2026, these reports have been updated: a second cycle of data collection with the same shared methodology. This is the first time the European tourism sector has comparable longitudinal skills intelligence at this level.

 

For HR professionals and educators, the value of having both cycles side by side is practical: you can see what has moved, and where the gap between planning and reality is still widening.

 

What we learned along the way

A few things stand out from four years of doing this work. The first is that skills gaps are rarely about training alone. They are about retention, working conditions, vitality, and whether people can see a future for themselves in the sector. The best-practice organisations we studied consistently treated upskilling as part of a broader idea of sustainable employability; not a course someone takes, but a working life someone can sustain.

 

The second is that the green, digital, and social transitions can’t be regarded as separate skills sets. The hotel sustainability coordinator we started with needs digital tools to measure her impact and social skills to bring her colleagues along. The Athens tour operator needs digital platforms to scale and a culturally literate workforce to make those platforms feel human. Treating these competencies as separate is not matching with reality.

 

The third (and maybe the most important) is that the people closest to the work usually already know what the gaps are. They just rarely have the time or tools to surface that knowledge in a way that can shape policy or investment.

 

What comes next

The PANTOUR project closes mid-2026, but the SSIM and the Country Skills Profile reports are built to outlast the project and to be brought further in the FuTour Alliance project. The SSIM methodology is open, the templates are downloadable and the National and Regional Skills Partnerships now exist in most of the participating countries.

 

For anyone working on skills in tourism and hospitality; in industry, in education, in government, in HR;  the toolkit to continuously measure and monitor skills sets is there. In the new FuTour Alliance project these outputs will be brought to the next level. In the meantime, the tools are available now to critically evaluate skills and competences throughout the whole sector.