ADB Sustainable Tourism Forum 2026

📅 17 – 19 November 2026
ADB Headquarters, Manila, Philippines

Tourism is driving economic growth across Asia and the Pacific, creating over 200 million jobs. The sector’s importance is expected to rise, with tourism’s share of gross domestic product projected to grow from 8% to 10% over the coming decade. This will create significant opportunities for new investment, jobs, and local economic development. Realizing this potential will require robust institutions and well-coordinated investments that strengthen the private sector and ensure tourism’s benefits are shared widely and inclusively.

The ADB Sustainable Tourism Forum 2026 brings together tourism, development, and finance officials from Asian Development Bank (ADB) developing member countries (DMCs) alongside ADB project and technical specialists and international experts. Over 3 days, participants will build connections while exchanging tourism development lessons, good practices, and practical tools. They will come away better equipped to translate tourism development opportunities into stronger projects and development outcomes.

Objectives

The forum aims to strengthen the capacity of ADB and its DMCs to use tourism more effectively as an instrument for sustainable and inclusive development. Specifically, it will:

• Strengthen knowledge and exchange on how tourism investment can contribute to development outcomes, drawing on operational experience, research, international good practice, and lessons from DMCs.
• Build practical capacity to identify binding constraints and market failures affecting destinations, and to design integrated, multisectoral, and private-sector-oriented responses.
• Strengthen the quality and pipeline of tourism operations by helping ADB teams and DMC counterparts identify, conceptualize, and prepare tourism investments and tourism components within broader sector operations.
• Build stronger networks and partnerships among ADB teams, DMCs, and external tourism institutions to facilitate continued knowledge exchange and collaboration after the forum.

Target participants

• DMC participants: representatives from ministries and departments of tourism, local and provincial governments, project management units, and other government agencies involved in tourism development.
• ADB participants: staff working on tourism as well as staff from sector, regional, private sector, and climate change teams that shape destination development.
• Selected international organizations, tourism industry representatives, and technical experts.

Registration