UN Tourism

The United Nations World Tourism Organization or UN Tourism (formerly UNWTO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations which promotes responsible, sustainable and universally-accessible tourism. Its headquarters are in Madrid, Spain. Other offices include: a Regional Support Office for Asia and the Pacific in Nara, Japan and a Regional Office for the Middle East in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

UN Tourism serves as a global forum for tourism policy and a source of tourism research and knowledge. It encourages tourism competitiveness, innovation, education, investments and digital transformation. The organization also focusses on ethics, culture and social responsibility related to tourism, provides technical cooperation and includes a UN Tourism Academy and statistics work.

The six official languages of UN Tourism are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism stood at an all-time high with 1.5 billion international tourist arrivals in 2019, according to the organization's ''World Tourism Barometer''. Against a backdrop of heightened uncertainty, UN Tourism conveyed the Global Tourism Crisis Committee to guide the tourism sector as it faced up to the COVID-19 challenge. A 2021 panel data study using UNWTO datasets showed that the global tourism sector lost approximately 604.8 billion USD under the best-case COVID-19 scenario and over 1.9 trillion USD in the worst-case scenario, underscoring the need for international policy coordination through organizations like the UNWTO. Following a massive 72% drop in international arrivals in 2020 due to the pandemic, travel gradually recovered and attained pre-pandemic levels in 2024 .

From its inception in 1975 until 2023, the UN World Tourism Organization was abbreviated as UNWTO. Provided by Wikipedia