Values

• Spread across Europe and worldwide, the culture of quality for tourist services, in order to foster their competitiveness within the European (internal) and international market.
• Reinforce the synergies between quality and corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainable development and climate change mitigation, accessibility, digitalization and innovation, with holistic approach.
• Enhance the local identity (genius loci) of the territory, especially at Regional and local level, in order to ensure the people to people experiential travel, discovering peculiarities and excellences of the destination and the tourism supply chain (hotels, restaurants, agritourism, B&B, golf clubs, marine and alpine resort ..);
• Enhance the level of trust and credibility among the consumers of the tourist services and its value chain, towards the certified tourism companies, including cultural providers.
• Consolidate the image and profile of Europe as a collection of sustainable and high-quality tourist destinations.

 

Objectives

• Promote the development of sustainable, responsible and high-quality tourism
• Promote national (and /or regional) quality schemes as well as European certified companies operational within the Member States, the pre-accession countries, the European macro regions (Baltic, Adriatic and Ionian, Danube and Alpine) and, potentially within non-EU countries.
• Foster mutual cooperation between European certified companies located in the 27 Member States, in order to deal with common challenges, addressing consumers choices (the most effected by high quality services/products)
• Recognize and promote high qualified tourism sector activities under a unique EU UMBRELLA (which comply with specific common criteria), to ensure transparency and to avoid overlapping and confusion.
• Support technical services (informative, logistical, organizational, etc.) for joint tourist promotion activities.
• Develop intelligent, innovative, sustainable, quality tourism management and sustainable business models, in line with the European priorities and strategy towards 2030 and the financial instruments (i.e. European Green Deal, European, UN Agenda 2030 and the 17 SDGs, EU Circular economy strategy, new European Structural Investment Funds- ESIF 2021-2027))
• Encouraging collaboration between the European networks which are dealing with the same issues, and partnerships between public and private tourist stakeholders.
• Develop transnational thematic tourist packages, focused on the high qualiy labelled companies, to increase the attractiveness of tourist destinations.

 

Target

All tourism companies certified, operating in the following sectors:

- Hospitality: hotels, B&B, country houses, guest houses;

- Catering: restaurants, trattorie, pizzerie, gelaterie;

- Services: car rental and other means of locomotion and entertainment, guides, excursions;

- Food and wine production: DOP, IGP, DOCG production and other typical agri-food products

- Crafts: typical crafts, glass, ceramic artefacts;

 

Statute of the Association

To be downloaded the french version

 

Partnerships

ETQA is open and available to establish win=win collaboration with other European and/or international organisations/networks/associations, which are sharing similar objectives and goals, in order to join forces and capitalize the implementation of common activities. Below, the list of agreements signed by ETQA, so far:

 

	UNICART - International Conference Academic Research & Tourism	Memorandum of Understanding IARC-USC
	International Academic Research Center USC	Memorandum of Understanding IARC-USC