site.btaMinister Borshosh: Data Management and Digitalization Are of Key Importance to Sustainable Tourism Development

Tourism Minister Miroslav Borshosh met with SMARTOURISM.BG project manager Hristo Hristozov and project coordinator Diana Bancheva. The project is aimed at exploring the practices and challenges of data management in tourism with a focus on several key areas - smart human resource management in tourism, innovative models and technologies for tourism management, tourism destination management and data security in the sector, the Tourism Ministry said in a press release on Tuesday.

"Undoubtedly one of our goals is the digitalization of the sector, and gaining data literacy is of strategic relevance. It is important that we work towards investing in the training of teachers in vocational tourism schools and pilot universities to include in their educational programmes the creation of positive attitudes, competence and skills for working with data," Borshosh said.

The meeting discussed the benefits of good data governance and management for sustainable tourism development, the creation of a regional ecosystem for good data governance and management, partnerships with tourism vocational schools, universities and municipalities. The conversation also discussed a proposal to create a working group to prepare an unified data management system that would be opened to the public to access specific aggregated data.  At this stage, expert consensus is sought on the content disclosure allowed by the system, relative to the regularity of data collection, and the aim is to have real and practical benefits for the tourism business, industry organisations, researchers and experts. 

The Ministry of Tourism has received an invitation to become a patron of the forthcoming National Conference “Good Data Governance in Tourism” in November 2025 in Sofia, which will discuss the results of the regional forums, training programmes in tourism professional schools and universities.