Finland’s National Tourism Strategy, Achieving More Together - Sustainable Growth and Renewal in Finnish Tourism 2022-28, guides tourism policy and programme development in Finland. The Strategy was originally launched in 2019 and updated in 2022 to better reflect the changing operational environment, including following the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. The High-Level Working Group on Tourism played a key role in designing the update. The updated Strategy identifies four priorities to facilitate sustainable growth and renewal in the tourism sector, including: (i) supporting sustainable development; (ii) responding to the digital transformation; (iii) improving accessibility; and (iv) ensuring an operating environment that supports competitiveness. The objective is for Finland to become the most sustainably growing tourism destination in the Nordic countries.
An action plan for the years 2022-23 supported the implementation of the Strategy, with a broad range of targeted actions and goals requiring collaboration of many actors, including tourism businesses, destinations, regions, funding authorities and ministries. Actions were implemented within the resources made available by central government spending limits and budgets, with no specific budget allocation for the implementation phase. The monitoring of Finland's National Tourism Strategy and Action Plan occur collectively, with specific measurements every two years. A monitoring report on the implementation of the 2022–23 Action Plan will be published in early autumn 2024. Based on the monitoring results, updates to the Strategy and subsequent Action Plan, will be made, if necessary.
Key tourism policy priorities include supporting sustainable development of tourism businesses and destinations, strengthening climate action, clarifying legislation on short-term rentals to correspond to the current practices and needs, and supporting knowledge-based management at the national and regional level. These priorities are translated into programmes such as the Sustainable Travel Finland Programme, launched in 2020 following a successful pilot in 2018-19. Visit Finland works closely with the Finnish tourism businesses and regions, including to develop and report national indicators for sustainable tourism. According to the results of the first State of Sustainable Tourism report launched in 2023, tourism businesses and destinations have high engagement in environmental protection and climate action, but less focus on social impacts. Therefore, Visit Finland will prioritise activities and advancements in diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2024. The indicators are visualised in a real-time online dashboard and will inform the evaluation and updated target setting for the National Tourism Strategy and supporting actions in 2024. The programme also aims to gather qualitative data on tourism employment which will help to evaluate and develop setting targets for the Strategy and Action Plans regarding tourism workforce issues.
Visit Finland published its Climate Action Plan in November 2023 to provide tourism businesses, tourism destinations and Visit Finland with a pathway to systematically reducing emissions from tourism. A 2024 progress report will include a roadmap to help preserve natural environments, seek ways to use nature-based solutions to regenerate nature and increase the positive impacts of tourism. In addition, almost 70 Finnish tourism organisations have signed the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism. All signatories are required to provide climate action plans for decreasing their CO2 emissions.
Additionally, the Ministries of the Environment, Justice and Economic Affairs and Employment have started to map the current legislation framework to identify the needs for a legislative update. The conditions for short-term rentals will be regulated while making available better methods to address problems. Finland launched a new border survey in 2023. The open data is updated monthly (see box below). While additional monitoring efforts at the national level are challenging, some destinations have developed monitoring systems including dashboards and analysis methods and knowledge-based models to enhance decision-making at the destination level.
