Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-09-26-Speech-1-115-000"
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"en.20110926.19.1-115-000"2
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"−
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start first of all by thanking the Commission, the Council, the shadow rapporteurs and the rapporteurs for the opinion of a further five committees who, in addition to the Committee on Transport and Tourism responsible, worked on this own-initiative report.
It is the first own-initiative report since the Treaty of Lisbon introduced the European Union’s responsibility for tourism policy under Article 195. Tourism is naturally an area in which there is strong competition between countries and often within each individual country there is competition between regions and areas. Therefore, what sense does trying to work together on a political framework for tourism in Europe make?
I think that it makes a lot of sense, because we are faced with a different world to that of 20 years ago; a multipolar world in which new countries are emerging, appearing and offering Europe a large number of new potential tourists who we must engage with in order to secure Europe’s place as the world’s number one tourist destination. It makes sense because tourism is one of the sectors which has withstood the global crisis most effectively, thus we must invest heavily to sustain the competitiveness of our tourism businesses and to maintain the visibility of our tourist destinations.
With this report we propose to advance the 21 actions which the European Commission and Vice-President Tajani identified in the June 2010 communication and to identify which of these 21 actions are the priorities to deal with immediately within a fixed timeframe.
First of all, the subject of measures for supporting competitiveness and access to credit for tourism businesses; the subject of training and professional qualifications with the need to invest heavily in new professionals with managerial aspirations to attract these new waves of tourism; the basic theme of innovation and of information and communication technologies to improve the prominence and presence of our businesses and of our destinations on online marketplaces.
We must find new means by which to overcome a rigid seasonality, which constricts the tourist season and limits the opportunity for growth in our businesses. We must continue to invest in the actions that have yielded good results so far, I refer specifically to Calypso. We must work on environmental sustainability and on the accessibility of tourist facilities and destinations, so that the several million possible and potential tourists with reduced mobility can be fully entitled tourists.
We must promote the cultural routes, as has been done by the Council of Europe in recent years, and introduce new ones. We must invest in international events, as they can be used to attract tourists coming from outside the European Union. We must invest in quality, emphasising quality as a key tenet of the European tourism offering.
We must not hide from the fact that there is a problem regarding the funding of the tourism policy. Until now there was no jurisdiction and thus there were no notable budget lines to be able to advance these projects, moreover many resources were slightly hidden inside the Structural Funds. Therefore we must, on one hand, make the existing resources more visible and, on the other hand, work closely with the Commission on specific budget headings so that we are able to progress the 21 actions and all the ambitious projects that we have.
This is the future that we have outlined with this report, which must not be a cat set among the pigeons, but the first step of an endeavour to which I believe the European Parliament could still give much more."@en1
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