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There are forums that confirm what we already know. And there are forums that force us to reframe the questions. The Global Sustainable Islands Summit 2026 was, for those who paid close attention to what happened there, the second kind.
Canarias Living Lab was one of the actors that brought more than diagnoses to that stage. It brought methodology. It brought evidence. And in a debate that too often moves between good intentions and insufficient indicators, that makes a difference worth noting.
The problem with how we measure tourism
For decades, the tourism industry has evaluated its own performance with tools designed to measure volume, not value. Arrivals, overnight stays, average spend. Indicators that say a great deal about how much tourism a destination receives and very little about the quality of what that tourism generates, for the visitor, for the local community and for the territory that sustains it.
This measurement gap is not a minor problem. It is, to a large extent, the reason why so many tourism sustainability strategies fall short: they are answering the wrong questions with incomplete data.
The application of neuromarketing to tourism, which Sergio Moreno Gil presented with precision at the Global Sustainable Islands Summit, offers a different response. If we want to know whether a destination is generating genuinely valuable experiences, experiences that visitors remember, that strengthen their connection to a place and that inspire more responsible behaviour, we need to measure what happens before the tourist rationalises it. What happens, quite literally, in their body and in their brain.
Why islands are the most urgent Laboratory
Not all destinations are equally vulnerable. Islands, as closed systems with limited resources and singular ecosystems, concentrate the risks of poorly managed tourism in ways that continental destinations rarely experience with the same intensity.
What happens on an island when tourism exceeds its carrying capacity is not a sectoral problem. It is a territorial one. And island territories do not have the same capacity for absorption, dispersal or recovery as larger-scale destinations.
That is why Canarias is a globally relevant case study. And why the research developed by Canarias Living Lab, supported by Emotur Lab and connected to the academic mission of our International Master’s in Tourism and Sustainable Development at TIDES, carries a value that goes well beyond the local.
What Canarias can teach the world
There is a tendency in international tourism forums to treat European island destinations as case studies in problems rather than sources of solutions. The Global Sustainable Islands Summit 2026 was an exception to that tendency , and the participation of Canarias Living Lab contributed to making it so.
Because what Sergio Moreno Gil presented on that stage was not simply a diagnosis of the challenges facing Canarian tourism. It was a methodological proposal with universal ambition: that understanding the emotional experience of the tourist is the first step toward designing destinations that deserve to endure.