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The National Commitment for Responsible Tourism is the response of the tourism sector to a moment of important changes and challenges. With this document, a road book is provided to move towards a new, more sustainable, inclusive and fair shared tourism model.
This agreement, promoted by the Generalitat de Catalunya, is the beginning of a process of collective transformation towards an environmentally responsible, socially fair, territorially balanced tourism, based on innovation and reconnected with the country's identity elements. The National Commitment for Responsible Tourism, presented publicly by the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès i Garcia, the Minister of Business and Work, Roger Torrent i Ramió, and the general director of Tourism, Marta Domènech i Tomàs, was born with more than 120 memberships of entities and associations from various fields.
In his speech, the Chief Executive stressed that Compromís is "the result of consensus" and opted for "advancing towards an even more sustainable, more diverse, more socially just and territorially shared tourism", for "projecting all the potential we have in Catalonia, which guarantees the well-being of citizens and the resources of the environment". Almost 15 million people visited Catalonia in 2022, "figures that call for a more sustainable model at all levels", stated the president and insisted that "we must work to maximize the positive impact and correct the impacts we don't like".
The Minister of Business and Work, for his part, stated that with this agreement "we are working to manage the present effectively and efficiently, but also to promote those structural changes that we believe the country needs. And we always do so based on dialogue, the open hand and collaboration with the actors and representative agents of each field”.
The National Commitment for Responsible Tourism “is the sector's response to this changing context; the goal that sets us where we want to go as a country in terms of tourism in the coming decades, what destination we want to leave our sons and daughters and what should be the value we want to give to our industry", highlighted the Director General of Tourism during the presentation of the agreement.
The Compromís, coordinated by the professor of the Faculty of Tourism of the University of Girona, José Antonio Donaire Benito, is the result of an intense collective work of 13 months to reconcile very different projects and views of the country. Some 700 people have participated in the elaboration of this agreement to define the new tourism model whose final objective is to be attractive to the visitor and to bring benefits and well-being to the territory and its people.
To face contemporary challenges, the Compromís proposes 67 measures in four large areas: environmental (23), social (19), territorial (13) and innovation (12) . This agreement is the tool to face current challenges jointly and by consensus with public administrations, companies and society hand in hand.
