Benidorm launches a pilot project to create a Dashboard to help measure and improve the environmental impact of the tourism sector

Benidorm City Council has launched a pioneering pilot project to boost the sustainability of the tourism sector by creating the first Municipal Tourism Sustainability Dashboard, a digital tool that will allow for the collection, analysis, and comparison of environmental indicators for the city's hotel sector.

Mayor Toni Pérez today announced the details of this ongoing pilot project, which falls under pillar number 9 of the 2023 Destination Tourism Sustainability Plan (PSTD) ‘Green Benidorm,’ funded by Next Generation EU funds. In short, “this is a collaborative project focused on improving sustainability and reducing the impact of participating establishments and, consequently, the destination, reinforcing our leadership as a Smart Tourism Destination.”

He explained that “hotels will contribute their data on energy consumption, water usage, waste generation, and emissions, which will be monitored and processed with full confidentiality guarantees.” All this data will be uploaded to a digital platform where establishments can visualise their progress through their own dashboards, accessing useful information to improve their environmental and operational efficiency and compare their situation with that of other hotels in their category. They will also have access to technical support to interpret the data and leverage it in their improvement processes.

The City Council, for its part, will be able to analyse aggregated data and sector comparisons offered by this Dashboard to "evaluate the destination's progress in terms of sustainability and make decisions that allow progress towards a more efficient, competitive, and sustainable tourism model."

In this way, thanks to this tool, it will be possible to "identify opportunities for energy savings and efficiency, adopt decisions based on objective data, promote benchmarking among establishments, prepare the sector for future regulatory requirements in environmental matters—also facilitating access to sustainability certifications—and, ultimately, reinforce Benidorm's positioning as a sustainable destination."

Toni Pérez emphasized that “the tourism of the future will be sustainable or it won't exist at all, and with this certainty, in Benidorm we have been working for over a decade on a strategy to strengthen our position as a sustainable destination, deploying actions and implementing tools that allow us to be more efficient, effective, and resilient, thereby improving the quality of life of our residents and the experience of those who visit us.”

The mayor invited “Benidorm's hotels to participate in this project to develop the Municipal Tourism Sustainability Dashboard, thus deepening the public-private collaboration that is yielding such positive results in terms of tourism management.”

For more information about the project, please visit the website:

https://plansostenibilidadturisticabenidorm.com/pstd2023-actuacion-ac-9/, from where you can also access the participation form.