PANTOUR National Conference Spain at FITUR 2026: skills, experience and what’s next for tourism

On 23 January 2026, we hosted the PANTOUR National Conference (Spain) during FITUR in Madrid, bringing together FITUR professional attendees, tourism companies, business organisations and tourism students. The conference created a shared space to focus on something the sector is feeling more and more clearly: skills are becoming a decisive factor for how tourism evolves.

A clear project snapshot: “PANTOUR at a glance”

The event featured the keynote “PANTOUR at a glance”, delivered by Álvaro Carrillo de Albornoz (ITH) and Ana María Camps (CEHAT). The presentation offered a clear overview of the project’s purpose and direction, linking PANTOUR’s work to workforce needs and the broader transformation of tourism.

 

A programme built around skills in real contexts

The agenda combined an opening talk and two round tables, each approaching skills from a different angle.

 

The opening session, “Casual Thinking: skills applied to every corner of the hotel” (by Juan Carlos Sanjuán, CEO & Founder of Casual Hoteles), framed skills as something that runs through daily hotel operations, from service delivery to team coordination and leadership. The session also brought in innovation as part of that day-to-day reality: improving processes, working smarter, and making change stick through the skills of the people delivering the service.

 

The first panel, “From the pitch to the stage: experience is the skills”, brought together perspectives from performance-driven environments and linked them to tourism and hospitality. The discussion also touched on a powerful idea: the destination as experience, what travellers remember is how a place makes them feel, and that experience is shaped through people, behaviours and consistency. The panel featured Nira Juanco (F1 Spanish Grand Prix), Iñigo Sánchez-Crespo (UMusic Hotel Madrid) and Pedro López Antépara (Atlético de Madrid), moderated by Juan Daniel Núñez (Smart Travel News).

 

The second panel, “Traveling in the age of hyper-information: sociology, humanism, and future”, opened a wider reflection on how travel is changing in a world of constant information, shifting expectations and fast transformation and what that means for organisations, teams and the skills they will need. The panel featured Miren Aurkene Alzua-Sorzabal (Universidad Nebrija), Cayetano Soler (PwC España) and Jesús Herrero (Tecnalia), moderated by Pablo Garrido (Tecnohotel).

 

Three takeaways from Madrid

Three ideas kept coming back throughout the conference:

 

• Skills are operational. They only matter if they improve how tourism works in practice: service, coordination, leadership and quality on the ground.
• Experience matters. If the destination is experience, then culture, consistency and human interaction become central, and those are built through skills and practice.
• Tech isn’t the whole story. Digital change is accelerating, but skills such as communication, judgement and trust remain essential to make that change work.

 

What Madrid really underlined was the central role of people’s skills in tourism. Whether we talk about innovation in hotel operations or about the destination as an experience, it ultimately depends on the capabilities of the teams delivering it every day. That focus on skills, and how to strengthen them in a practical way, is exactly where PANTOUR is putting its effort.