Swiss tourism is facing major challenges including rising costs, rapidly changing market trends, climate change, difficulties in recruitment and rising standards of digitalisation. To address these challenges, the Confederation published a new tourism strategy in 2017, with a vision for Switzerland to be an attractive and productive tourist destination with an internationally competitive tourism sector. For the years 2020 – 2023, the policy priority in Switzerland is the implementation of this tourism strategy. With a core focus on digital transformation, the strategy has four principal objectives:
Improving the framework conditions for tourism. Prioritisation is geared towards improving the way in which the government’s tourism policy is co-ordinated to maximise synergies. A second focus lies in providing a tourism-friendly regulatory environment. To do so, regulations will be streamlined where possible and processes and procedures at federal level simplified.
Promoting entrepreneurship with a focus on increasing productivity, boosting workforce skills and competencies, supporting structural change and strengthening the tourism labour market.
Exploiting the opportunities presented by the digital economy. A comprehensive study has analysed the challenges, opportunities and implications of digitalisation giving a robust basis for action. In 2019, Switzerland Tourism’s new online platform MySwitzerland.com was launched. With its launch, an important goal set out in the tourism strategy has been achieved.
Enhancing the attractiveness of the tourism offer and boosting market presence. The focus is on the development of large-scale sports and major MICE related events, such as world expos, as well as an assessment of the types of investment policies that can assist tourism.
Entrepreneurial thinking and action are decisive factors for successful tourism which is why promoting entrepreneurship is one of the main goals of the strategy. Collaboration with Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, has resulted in an analysis of how typical tourism businesses are formed and how they can best be supported. This identified the main challenges that companies in the tourism sector typically face in their start-up phase. Key messages from the analysis were that business creation stimulates competition and supports structural change, market failure justifies the State’s support for entrepreneurship, and, in Switzerland, a comprehensive support system is already provided. Various recommendations were made for improvement: for example, to improve the clarity of and the accessibility to support instruments; to design support for business creation using a network approach; to anchor entrepreneurship into apprenticeships and other educational opportunities, and to improve statistical data related to business creation. On the basis of these recommendations, SECO developed various measures. One is strengthened co-operation between SECO and Innosuisse, to ensure that Innosuisse's support is known and used by more of the private sector. Another step to boost business creation is to use Tourism Forum Switzerland as a platform for the promotion of start-up activities.
A Tourism Policy Advisory Group was established in 2017 to aid the development and implementation of the tourism strategy. The group, led by SECO, meets twice a year and serves as a sounding board. It has a balanced membership of entrepreneurs, tourism organisations, policy-makers and academics. The Group is informed about the state of current work, consulted regarding key activities and gives concrete advice as regards the development of future policy. The dialogue ensures that emerging trends and issues are fully understood and necessary policy action is taken.
