Global tourism consists almost entirely of small businesses. In the European Union, micro-enterprises account for 95.9% of all tourism companies, while the industry provides 9.3% of employment across the EU27. With such a fragmented market, one might assume that success comes through construction: a new hotel, a new resort, a new airport. In practice, the opposite is true. The companies genuinely changing the industry build almost nothing. They change the business model around assets that already exist.
Consider some of the names shaping the global tourism business today. GetYourGuide does not own a single tour. It is a marketplace that connects travellers conveniently with thousands of local guides. Holidu applies a similar model to accommodation: it builds no apartments but aggregates other people’s listings and makes them easier to search. Limehome goes further, taking ordinary existing apartments and turning them into a network of branded units with a common service standard. TravelPerk sells neither tickets nor rooms but software for managing corporate travel. Hopper earns money from a fintech layer added to an airline ticket: it predicts whether the fare will rise and sells insurance against an increase. AirHelp has nothing to do with transportation at all. It is an automated legal service that recovers compensation for delayed flights. None of these businesses has added a single room or aircraft to the world. Each has simply found a new way to make money from what is already there.
The industry’s digital gap is vast, and it shows where the real weakness lies. Across the EU economy, 13.5% of large companies, roughly one in seven, already use at least one form of artificial intelligence. In accommodation and food services, the figure is less than half as high, at 6%. The problem is not a shortage of hotels or restaurants. It is that almost none of their owners has built a technological layer into the business that changes the underlying revenue model.
Business demographics in the sector are equally revealing. Almost 2 million accommodation and food-service businesses operated in the EU in 2024. The annual birth rate of new companies was 9.8%, while the death rate was 7.9%. The narrow gap means the market is growing, but slowly and with difficulty. Differences among countries are enormous. Malta has the highest rate of new business creation in the sector, at 19.52% a year. Estonia also has a high birth rate, at 14.55%, but the highest business death rate in Europe as well, at 22.93%. Companies appear and disappear there at almost the same speed. Greece, Portugal and Spain show active business creation as tourism demand recovers. Austria and Italy have lower birth rates. Their markets are mature and stable, but that also makes them harder to enter with a new idea.
A wide range of players support these businesses around the world, and this is another part of the picture. National and regional governments build their own programmes. Austria finances tourism businesses through a dedicated tourism development bank. Portugal linked its Industry 4.0 digitalisation programme to a separate Tourism 4.0 initiative and, over ten years, became a notable international centre for digital and sustainable tourism solutions. Ireland created a system in which tourism startup applications pass through a single window into the national entrepreneurship hub instead of becoming lost among different agencies. Industry associations, universities, private investors and pan-European funding programmes such as COSME and Horizon Europe operate alongside them.
Support itself falls into two fundamentally different formats that should not be confused. An incubator works with the rawest form of an idea. It provides workspace, mentoring and access to a network, often over a long period and without a rigid deadline. An accelerator takes a startup whose concept is already formed and prepares it intensively to meet investors within a few months, offering training, mentoring and access to capital, almost always in return for an equity stake and culminating in a final investor presentation. In reality, most programmes mix the two formats, but the difference in logic remains. One model nurtures an idea; the other stress-tests it against the market.
This distinction did not emerge overnight. The first generation of support programmes simply gave companies a roof, an office and a desk. Later generations added a technological component and specialised innovation services. Accelerators represent a fourth generation, created when the market needed more than support: it needed companies prepared rapidly and within a fixed timeframe for serious growth. All four generations now operate in parallel, with about 900 such initiatives active across the EU.
Within this mass of programmes, thematic specialisation is clear. Some platforms focus on a specific niche. Web3Tour and France Tourisme Tech work on digital transformation, while EU-level initiatives such as FU-TOURISM, SUSRUR, StarGrowth, IN4Blue and SUSTOURA specialise in sustainability. Some fields are narrower still. Slow Tourisme Lab in France promotes slow tourism; Italy’s Faros works with the blue economy and maritime projects; Singapore’s InnovaT°360 focuses on agrifood tourism; and Europe’s CulturalDeTour supports projects built around cultural heritage.
The geography of support operates through several nested levels. At the top are pan-European initiatives such as FU-TOURISM, SUSTOURA, ST3ER and Web3Tour, which work across several countries. Next come national programmes embedded in state tourism agencies: the startup platform at CzechTourism, France Tourisme Lab, Italy’s Argo Traveltech accelerator and Portugal’s FIT programme. Finally, regional and local initiatives anchor innovation in a specific place: Tech2b and Startup Burgenland in Austria, HUBBAZIA in Opatija, Croatia, Alpes Tourisme Lab in France, Athens Digital Lab in Greece, Warsaw Booster in Poland and Madeira Startup Retreat in Portugal.
Three examples show how this works in practice. The pan-European ST3ER programme provided non-repayable funding to more than 200 small and medium-sized tourism companies in Denmark, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. Italy’s Argo in Venice takes startups through a five-month programme and offers pre-seed funding of up to €75,000, plus an additional grant of up to €25,000 from the country’s tourism ministry. Austria’s Tech2b also provides a grant, of up to €10,000, but with one condition: the company must locate in Upper Austria.
Ownership structures are equally varied. The largest group consists of public and public-private programmes linked to ministries and development agencies. Denmark’s Hub for Innovation in Tourism is run by Copenhagen’s municipal innovation hub in partnership with several national tourism organisations. The corporate segment is also growing. Hotel group Falkensteiner has its own venture arm; German railway company Deutsche Bahn runs DB mindbox; Spain’s national airport operator Aena created Aena Ventures; and Plug and Play operates a dedicated Travel & Hospitality practice. There are also more targeted corporate formats with fixed time horizons, including Lufthansa’s innovation hub, the Booking.com Booster programme and TUI’s TravelTech4Good initiative.
Greece’s CapsuleT deserves particular attention. It is owned and operated directly by the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels. During its lifetime, 420 founders have passed through 14 separate programmes. Alumni include Campsaround, a campsite booking service; Vivestia, a platform for operational processes in accommodation; and Hotellisense, an AI-based analytics service for hotels. Portugal’s FIT programme has reached a similar scale, with more than 180 corporate and institutional partners and 95 accelerator programmes delivered. Plug and Play Travel & Hospitality has over 100 corporate partners worldwide, including Airbus, Austrian Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Accor. Since 2018, Luxembourg’s city incubator has supported more than 200 startups that collectively raised €200 million.
A clear pattern also emerges in the stage at which support is offered. The earliest pre-seed stage is best served, through bootcamps and idea competitions such as CheckINN in Hungary, the Sejalec Awards in Slovenia and Madeira Startup Retreat in Portugal. The seed stage is the system’s operational core, home to Argo Traveltech and Sweden’s SPARX Accelerator, supported by Sodexo. Programmes for mature companies that need to scale and transform their business are notably scarce. France Tourism Lab, Portugal’s BoostX, Romania’s F&B Business Accelerators and the pan-European ST3ER are among the few operating in this segment.
Programme duration reflects the same bias towards fast formats. CapsuleT, Argo, Portugal’s From Start-to-table and Aena Ventures last three to six months. Welcome City Lab and France Tourisme Tech run for up to a year. Truly long-term, open-ended formats are almost absent. Greece’s Athens TEA is a rare permanent programme without a fixed cycle, while Luxembourg’s incubator has accepted participants over many years without a rigid schedule.
The physical infrastructure available to startups is a separate issue, and here the shift from a simple office to a genuine testing ground is especially interesting. The Netherlands’ Airport Innovation Runway at Schiphol allows startups to test ideas inside a working airport. Trials there have included a new approach to baggage reclaim, autonomous buses and robotic arms for moving luggage. Spain’s Aena Ventures works in a similar way, testing new services directly in terminals used by real passengers. The EHL Innovation Hub in Lausanne brought about 65 projects to implementation in 2024 and 2025. Italy’s Faros offers a maritime innovation hub instead of an office, while Falkensteiner uses its own hotels and resorts as pilot sites for new solutions.
The services startups receive also vary widely. Mentoring and coaching are almost always at the core, as with France’s Accélérateur Tourisme and the pan-European Scaling Experiences and StarGrowth. Next come access to business networks, training and skills development, offered by programmes such as BoostX and The Journey in Portugal, together with technical and research support. Some initiatives go further with highly specialised services: assistance with cross-border VAT, advice on carrier-liability standards and accessibility for people with disabilities, and a dedicated function for partnerships with destination-management organisations, offered by Denmark’s Hub for Innovation in Tourism and Welcome City Lab in Paris.
A useful model describes the startup journey from the birth of an idea to a mature business: discovery, testing the hypothesis in the market, improving efficiency, scaling, reaching profitability and, finally, becoming an established company. Incubators work at the earliest stages, accelerators in the middle and venture capital at the scaling stage and beyond. The problem is that the actual support system is densely populated at the beginning of this journey and becomes markedly thinner towards the end.
The money moving through the system reveals the same bias towards starting companies rather than changing their models. Grants and subsidies are the most common form of early-stage finance, requiring little proof beyond the company’s existence. Equity is a far more demanding instrument used by more mature accelerators. To receive capital in exchange for a stake, a business must show that its model genuinely works and can grow. This second type of financing forces startups to devise not merely a product but a functioning business model. Yet it is the least common form in the system.
The industry also has a systemic problem it has yet to solve: almost no one properly measures whether all this support works. Most programmes report participant numbers, events and reach. Few track how many supported companies survive after three years, how many jobs they actually create or how much private investment they eventually attract. Even the International Labour Organization openly acknowledges that convincing evidence of the economic return from such support remains insufficient. A proper assessment should cover three dimensions at once. First, what happened to the company: did it survive, increase revenue and create jobs? Second, what was the quality of the support programme: how strong was the mentoring and how active was the business network? Third, what happened to the surrounding ecosystem: did new tourism products emerge, and did the regional innovation system become stronger overall?
These patterns reveal clear structural gaps. The industry’s central challenges, labour shortages and weak adoption of data and artificial intelligence, are still poorly reflected in support-programme agendas. Specialised testing grounds such as airports and hotels remain concentrated in a narrow group of countries and cities rather than being widely available. The system depends heavily on public funding and is therefore vulnerable to any change in budget priorities. As already noted, monitoring outcomes remains a weakness almost everywhere.
Several concrete directions follow. First, support programmes should be tied more closely to genuine business priorities and established market players. This requires regulated testing environments with access to hotels and transport systems, as well as intermediaries that connect developers of new solutions technically with traditional tourism businesses. Costa Rica’s Conect Tourism, Colombia’s Econexia and the living laboratory in Puerto Nariño in the Colombian Amazon work in this way, with the last testing solutions alongside local communities. Second, programmes should form a single vertical structure in which local initiatives feed national ones and national schemes connect to pan-European projects. France’s nine-programme France Tourisme Lab network follows this model, while international accelerators should help startups with local registration and taxation when they enter new markets. Third, available programmes should be made visible at every stage of a startup’s life through national tourism-innovation portals and very early-stage events such as Hungary’s CheckINN and Slovenia’s Sejalec Awards. Fourth, permanent and open-ended support should be developed alongside rigid, fixed-term programmes, following the example of CapsuleT and Welcome City Lab, so that startups at any stage know where to turn. Fifth, the startup market should be monitored systematically: which programmes exist, how they are funded and how many companies genuinely survive. Tools such as Austrian Startup Monitor, Startup Landscape Austria and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor offer a foundation.
For Kazakhstan and Central Asia, this is not an abstract story from another world. Discussion of tourism development here also tends to revolve around physical assets: new hotels, resort infrastructure, room capacity and air links. These matter, but global experience shows that real growth in tourism in recent years has come not from construction but from companies that discover new ways to earn money from existing hotels, destinations, guides and transport. A model in which an airport or hotel chain becomes a testing ground for new services, instead of constructing a separate building labelled an innovation centre, could work well here, particularly since Kazakhstan already has substantial infrastructure in the form of airports and a national airline. If policy focuses only on concrete and rooms rather than digital services layered on top of them, the gap with more technologically advanced markets will continue to widen, just as Europe’s AI adoption gap has grown. The question is not how many new assets should be built. It is who will learn to make money from models that have already proved themselves globally, including aggregation, subscriptions, platform intermediation and fintech layers added to familiar services, and whether the country’s business-support system is prepared to finance not only the launch of an idea but its development into a durable company.
Shyngys Yerbolat, EconomyKZ Research Group, exclusively for EconomyKZ.org
