Shaping Tourism Transformation: Cooperation Instruments & Market Partnerships
Summary
This session at ITB Berlin 2026 examined practical cooperation instruments for sustainable tourism development in partner countries, featuring two detailed case studies: a GIZ bilateral cooperation project in Tunisia (2019–2025) and an Import Promotion Desk (IPD) matchmaking partnership connecting Uzbekistan's Noratau Travel with German tour operator Hauser Exkursionen. The session was moderated by Susanna (director of the Agency for Business and Economic Development) and featured speakers from GIZ, the German Travel Association (DRV), the Tunisian Federation of Travel Agencies (FTAV), Noratau Travel, Hauser Exkursionen, and the Import Promotion Desk.
The Tunisia case study centered on a GIZ project initiated in 2019 under a bilateral agreement between the German and Tunisian governments, co-financed by the European Union, with a six-year implementation horizon. The project addressed structural challenges in Tunisian tourism despite the country recovering to 9.5 million tourist arrivals in 2025–2026, matching pre-COVID 2018–2019 levels. Tourism contributes 13–14% of Tunisia's GDP, but the sector remained heavily concentrated in coastal areas, while high youth unemployment and significant regional disparities persisted in rural zones. The GIZ project focused on three thematic pillars: culinary tourism, active outdoor/adventure tourism, and cultural tourism. It supported development of thematic routes including a culinary route, a cinematographic route linking Star Wars and Indiana Jones filming locations, a hiking route, and a UNESCO heritage sites route. The project worked with 800 companies and entrepreneurs, created 1,300 jobs (approximately 800 of which went to women and youth), and increased average company income by 10–20%. The German Travel Association (DRV) partnered with FTAV through an association partnership program, running destination forums that brought 60–80 German travel agents to Tunisia to experience off-beach products, accompanied by embedded journalists for social and print media coverage in Germany's top travel trade magazine. The FTAV also launched a website called 'Tunisia Explorer' to showcase diversified, sustainable tourism products. Ahmed Bettaïeb (FTAV President) noted the project achieved more than 96% of its stated objectives.
The Uzbekistan case study featured Noratau Travel, an inbound tour operator founded in 2012 and based in central Uzbekistan, which grew out of a GIZ community-based tourism project. Noratau specializes in cultural adventures, hiking, trekking, horse riding, and cycling tours in Uzbekistan and neighboring Central Asian countries. In 2023, the Import Promotion Desk connected Noratau with Hauser Exkursionen — a German tour operator with over 50 years of experience specializing in hiking, trekking, and biking trips worldwide with small groups of up to 12 guests. The match enabled Hauser to launch a standalone Uzbekistan product for the first time, focused on the Nuratau Mountains. Since the IPD partnership began, Noratau's tourism sales increased approximately 40%, and the team grew from 10 to 19 employees. The IPD's operational model involves identifying sustainable tourism companies in the Global South, providing training for European market readiness, exhibiting at trade shows (ITB Berlin hall 4.1, stand 221; WTM London), and facilitating direct business matchmaking with European buyers.
The session also outlined the broader 'Partners in Transformation' umbrella of programs offered by Germany's Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, including: the Agency for Business and Economic Development (central contact point), the develoPPP program (grants of €100,000–€2 million with private sector co-financing), a Business and Human Rights Help Desk, Impact Connect (EU company loans of €750,000–€5 million), the Import Promotion Desk, and chamber/association partnership programs. A recurring theme was the complementarity between bilateral cooperation (policy-level groundwork, risk reduction) and private sector involvement (market linkages, customer knowledge, commercial scale).
Key Takeaways
- •Tunisia's tourism sector recovered to 9.5 million arrivals in 2025–2026, matching its 2018–2019 pre-COVID peak, yet the GIZ project identified persistent structural challenges: tourism revenues were still concentrated in coastal zones, youth unemployment remained high, and rural areas with strong tourism potential were largely underdeveloped. The project's rationale was not whether tourism would grow but how it would grow more inclusively.
- •The GIZ Tunisia project ran from 2019 to 2025 (six years) and was grounded in a bilateral government agreement between Germany and Tunisia, additionally co-financed by the European Union. It operated across three thematic areas — culinary tourism, active outdoor tourism, and cultural tourism — chosen because they offered the strongest assets for genuine product diversification.
- •Over six years, the GIZ project worked with 800 companies and entrepreneurs, created 1,300 jobs (approximately 800 targeting women and youth specifically), and increased average income for supported companies by 10–20%. Jose Froehling (GIZ project head) described these as the headline numerical outcomes, while noting that the most significant achievement was creating a self-sustaining dynamic of diversification across the whole Tunisian tourism ecosystem.
- •Ahmed Bettaïeb (FTAV President) reported that the joint DRV–FTAV association partnership achieved more than 96% of its stated objectives across the combined six-year engagement (an initial three-year agreement followed by a further three-year renewal). He credited detailed, scientifically structured working methods and a mapped approach to skill-building and commercialization with reaching this outcome.
- •The DRV–FTAV destination forum format is a distinctive marketing instrument: 60–80 German travel agents are split into groups, spread across Tunisia to experience off-beach products, accompanied by embedded journalists who capture testimonials and photos. A final workshop day synthesizes findings, and coverage runs in Germany's top travel trade magazine alongside social media. The format generates peer-to-peer credibility — Volker Adams noted that participating agents reported receiving calls from colleagues asking 'Is that true what you said in your interview?'
- Chafi Mrouki (DRV, based in Tunisia) identified cross-cultural working-style differences as the primary challenge in the partnership: German processes tend to be structured with clear timelines and responsibilities, while Tunisian collaboration is relationship-driven and coordination-oriented, leading to differing expectations about pace and priorities. His role was explicitly to build trust, facilitate communication, and bridge these expectations.
Transcript
Okay, welcome back everyone. That was a short break and for this second session we move from this sort of strategic frameworks to actually practice and that means you know how or what do corporation instruments actually look like in practice? How do those market partnership help build this more inclusive more resilient tourism uh economies in developing countries? And so it's called shaping tourism transformation and we'll have concrete cases from Tunisia and Usbakistan and examine how that bila...
