Measuring tourism’s carbon footprint is essential for sustainable destination management. But for smaller destinations, the data needed to do so is difficult to access. This is not a technical problem; It is a structural one. The European Tourism Data Space, aiming at improving data access to tourism stakeholders could change that.
A tale of two destinations
Imagine two destinations:
- The first is a major European capital with a dedicated tourism statistics unit, partnerships with national airlines, , and a team of analysts. When asked to calculate the carbon footprint of its visitors, it knows how to do so. It knows where its tourists come from, roughly how they arrived, and how long they stayed.
- The second is a small coastal municipality on the Mediterranean coast, a mountain village in the Alps, or an inland cultural heritage site in Central Europe. Its destination management organisation is run by two people. Its visitor data comes from a single hotel occupancy survey, collected once a year by the national tourism board. It has no idea how many guests arrived by car versus plane, which countries they came from in any detail, or what share of overnight stays ended up in private rentals versus registered accommodation.
Both destinations need to measure and reduce their carbon footprint. But only one can do so , based on available data. And this is not a rare case.
Why carbon footprint measurement depends so heavily on data
Calculating the carbon footprint of tourists at destination level is not as simple as reading an energy meter. It requires understanding :
- who your visitors are and where they come from,
- how they travelled to reach you,
- where they slept,
- what they did while being there.
Of these, transport is by far the most significant. A visitor flying from New York can emit more than 20 times the amount of CO2 in total than tourists arriving by train from a neighbouring region, even if they stay the same number of nights in the same hotel. Carbon footprint calculation tools make this possible (depending on the methodology and the CO2 calculator used, the measurements can differ), but they require input data to function accurately. Without it, the model relies on that can be way off from the local reality. Including CO2 emissions of airplanes in the calculations is significant to consider, while this is not always the case yet.
The uncomfortable truth is that to and from a destination is often the largest single component of its total tourism carbon footprint. Yet it is the least likely to be measured or reported accurately. Most sustainability assessments stop at the destination boundary. The emissions from getting there are often not or inaccurately considered.
For a large destination with good data, that blank can be filled with reasonable accuracy. For a smaller destination, it often cannot be filled at all. The result: carbon footprint reports that are either absent, incomplete, or so reliant on generic national averages that they lose all local meaning.
The structural problem: Data is fragmented and inaccessible
The data smaller destinations need , just not where they can easily reach it. Visitor origin data sits with , which only gather data at regional level, and very few at local level, transport mode splits are scattered across operators and airlines, and accommodation data is split between registered properties and informal lodging. No single organisation holds the full picture, and none are structured to serve a small Destination Management Ogranisation (DMO)’s needs.
This fragmentation creates real inequality. Larger destinations can invest in the partnerships needed to gather this data; smaller ones cannot, making their sustainability assessments less credible to green-conscious visitors and investors.
When data is missing, models fall back on national averages and generic defaults, but these rarely reflect a destination’s actual visitor flows and behaviours. Two destinations within the same country, one a car-accessible mountain resort and the other a flight-dependent coastal island, would have very different carbon profiles. Forced to use the same national defaults, both would appear similar on paper, leaving neither with the evidence needed to act
How the European Tourism Data Space (ETDS) will change the equation
This is precisely the structural challenge that DEPLOYTOUR was built to address, by creating a shared infrastructure where data from transport operators, national statistics, booking platforms, local DMOs… can be discovered, connected, and used – without anyone losing control of what they own.
For a small destination trying to calculate its carbon footprint, the practical difference is profound. Instead of spending months trying to gather visitor origin data from a national statistics institute that may not respond, or estimating transport modes based on anecdotal evidence, the destination can discover and access datasets already described in the ETDS catalogue: under clear conditions, with defined access rights, without any single actor holding all the keys.
But it is worth being precise about what the ETDS does provide, because the concept is easily misunderstood.
The ETDS is not a database. It does not store copies of data in one central location. Instead, it is best understood as a governed ecosystem of connectors: each organisation keeps its data at its own source, and what circulates through the system is metadata: descriptions of what data exists, who owns it, under what conditions it can be accessed, and for how long. A regional transport authority does not hand over its passenger records to a shared pool. It makes those records discoverable and accessible, on its own terms, to participants who meet the agreed conditions. For a small DMO, this is the critical difference: it means accessing richer, more granular data without depending on bilateral relationships or manual requests that often go unanswered.
For carbon footprint measurement, this unlocks several layers of currently inaccessible data. For instance, national statistics institutes participating in the ETDS could provide detailed visitor origin breakdowns. Transport mode data, scattered across operators and authorities, could sit in a shared catalogue under standardised access conditions rather than case-by-case negotiation. Accommodation data could be enriched by connecting formal registries with platform data.
The result is more comparable, reality-based data. Today, two destinations using the same methodology can produce wildly different results, one with real local data, the other filling gaps with national averages. The ETDS levels the playing field, giving an Alpine village and a coastal resort access to the same quality of underlying data.
There is also a longer-term shift to consider. Sustainability reporting in tourism is currently retrospective, calculated after visitor flows and transport choices have already happened. As ETDS data flows become more continuous, carbon monitoring could evolve from a backward-looking audit into a forward-looking management tool.
It is worth being clear-eyed about the kind of localisation the ETDS can realistically deliver. Its power lies in unlocking data that already exists at regional or national level but remains out of reach for small DMOs, locked behind institutional walls or commercial arrangements they have no leverage to enter alone. A small DMO in rural Slovenia or coastal Greece, currently relying on national averages and guesswork, could gain access to the same quality of data as a well-resourced urban destination. A shift from guesswork to governed access that enables real, evidence-based action over time.
The ETDS does not replace the upstream work of filling data gaps, such as transport mode splits or informal accommodation counts. Rather, it creates the collaborative framework to address them together, at European scale, rather than in isolation
To deep dive into this topic and get concrete first steps and good practices to start measuring destinations’ carbon footprint, listen to our podcast episode #5 : How can data support carbon footprint for destinations?