Mr. Laimer is a highly experienced statistician specializing in Tourism and Travel Statistics. After completing courses in Export and Tourism at the University of Economics Vienna and studying Geography at the University of Vienna, he began his career at Statistics Austria in 1993 and became responsible for the official “Tourism and Travel Statistics” in 1998. Currently, he serves as Deputy Director of the Directorate “Spatial Statistics,” overseeing various statistical domains, including tourism, road safety, energy/environmental and agricultural statistics. An active member of several international working groups, Mr. Laimer has contributed to projects with EUROSTAT, OECD, and UN Tourism, including work on Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) and methodological frameworks related to tourism statistics. He has provided consultancy on tourism statistics in multiple countries and has presented at numerous international conferences. Related to TSA he was engaged as a consultant for the European project 2008/2009 related to TSA; since 2013 he is one of the experts assessing the three annual Eurostat publication “TSA in Europe”. Since 2019 he is being acting as the course leader within the European Statistical Training Programme (ESTP) related to TSA. Mr. Laimer has been member of the UN Tourism Committee on Statistics since many years; he was chairing the Committee in 2016 and 2017, since 2018 he is Co-Chairing with Spain (until 2023) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Since 2016 he is being been leading the Working Group of Experts on Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism. In addition to his professional work, Mr. Laimer teaches Tourism Management at the University of Linz and the University of Applied Sciences for Management and Communication in Vienna. He is a member of the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism.