WTO | services - Symposium on tourism services 22-23 February 2001

The purpose of the symposium was “to evaluate current developments in international tourism” of relevance to the ongoing WTO services negotiations, and especially those developments related to a proposal from three developing countries, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Honduras, to add a tourism annex to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). WTO Members decided to hold an informal Symposium, in order to be able to invite a wider range of tourism experts, including from the private sector, as well as to more freely discuss the issues concerned.

Symposium presentations and discussions were centred upon three major themes. Session I, titled Specificity of Tourism as a Set of Industries Heavily Dependent on Network Services, and its Treatment in GATS, included a statistical overview of current trends in international tourism; a presentation on the complex sectoral economic linkages in tourism and the role of the Tourism Satellite Account (a statistical methodology for measuring the economy-wide impact of tourism); and an overview by the WTO Secretariat of the existing GATS disciplines and commitments.

Session II, titled The Competitive Environment — Travel Distribution Systems, Access to Information and Issues Related to Passenger Transport, concerned the rapidly changing commercial linkages behind the supply of tourism services, as well as reports on national-level experiences with the entire range of tourism-related issues by Cuba, Jamaica, Portugal and Thailand. Presentations were given on tour operators, global distribution systems (GDS), and travel agents; international tourism and passenger transport; electronic commerce; competition issues, including the existence of anti-competitive practices; and the social, economic and environmental sustainability of international tourism.

Session III was an Open Debate of all the issues concerned. Topics raised in the discussions for the Symposium as a whole included visa-related restrictions (a general problem for almost all aspects of international trade); the imperfect nature of both tourism statistics and tourism classification systems; effects of horizontal restrictions (e.g. lack of guaranteed market access for skilled workers); profit levels of tour operators; and anti-competitive practices in home-country markets, including aviation-related practices.

Introduction by the chairman (2 pages; 29 KB in Word format)