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Winning
over the creative class
New Greek tourism minister Aris Spiliotopoulos tables ambitious agenda
By
Andrew Princz
Reporting from
Thessaloniki for ontheglobe.com
He is youthful, suave and presents an ambitious agenda for his constituency. A feisty yet slight character, his eyes rather glare than look and while some are curious about his plans, others simply wonder if he will be able to push his agenda through. While this description may well sketch the fiery French President Nicolas Sarkozy, here I speak of the recently anointed and ambitious Tourism Minister of Greece Aris Spiliotopoulos who put forward his transformative agenda of this country's tourism sector last week in opening the Philoxenia International Tourism Fair in the country's northern city of Thessaloniki.
Spiliotopoulos, who was appointed tourism minister less than two months ago, has obviously had a plan in his back-pocket for some time. Here he pulled it out presenting a notion of what his national tourism policy will look like in the course of his term in office.
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"My plans can only fly if society embraces our efforts," said a determined Spiliotopoulos, "The notion that the Greeks are the waiters of Europe is obsolete. We need to promote the current image of a modern Greece."
Tourism in Greece employs over 850,000, and contributes some 1.5 billion Euro annually to the local economy. The new ministry plan will reorganize of the Greek representation offices and target growing markets of China, India and South Africa. Further energies will go into attracting more visitors from neighbouring Balkan states, Poland and Russia.
His multi-pronged program is axed on the key concepts of improving quality, entrepreneurship and promotion and advertising of the Greek tourism sector. He is also suggesting the development of ecological tourism, green investment and bringing Greece in the digital age with its marketing efforts.
"Buyers are on their computer screens and visitors and tourists alike are not just going to materialize. We must be able to win them over in order to become visitors," Spiliotopoulos emphasized, "since one-third of people today buy tourism products through new media; our objective is investing in this new media. We want to win the creative class over to us."
In addition to traditional advertising campaigns, these will now be bolstered by indirect advertising, promotional campaigns, and vigorous international public relations drives using both traditional and new media.
Analysts say, however, that making
strategic changes within the ministry itself will not be easy. Travel and
marketing consultant Dimitris Koutoulas says that the government momentarily
simply does not have the necessary mechanisms in place to implement new
marketing plans.
"What is lacking is an organizational structure since there are no contemporary marketing department inside of the ministry itself," says Koutoulas, "Even though one of its main tasks is to market the country internationally, it has up to now been done in a very basic way."
"With the preparation for the first time of a strategic marketing plan, the government will now have a tool in its hands which will allow it to plan strategically."
The new plan, however, will have to answer queries of some in the Greek tourism sector complain of poor transportation infrastructure, and lack of standardisation of the quality of services offered to travellers. The government intends to implement recommendations of a recently undertaken 2.5 million Euro marketing study. Koutoulas himself has been working with the City of Thessaloniki in developing a government-backed plan to propose the city as a European city-break destination for low-cost carriers.
"Thessaloniki offers a very attractive bundle of both historic monuments and a vibrant, pulsating, youthful city," he says, "It is an exciting destination which is largely unknown outside of Greece."
Koutoulas is banking on the continued
desire among Europeans to find new city-break destinations, which have been
expanding as fast as the mushrooming of European low-cost airline sector.
Plans for making a city-break destination for Greece's second largest city
will be an uphill battle and even the minister himself admits that those
plans will not materialize until private airlines begin flying to the city.
The Thessaloniki project
is just one of several aimed at promoting lesser-known facets of the country,
and shed the image of Greece simply sold as a land of sand, sea and sun.
In addition to trying to sell key Greek cities as city-break destinations,
the new direction will highlight villages and small towns, mountain climbing,
religious tourism or similar concepts not generally associated with Greece.
This concept will also extend the tourism season, classically associated
with the swarm of summer-time island visitors.
But the bread and butter of the Greek tourism, however, will not change. The majority of inbound tourists will continue to head to Greek seaside resorts and islands. Koutoulas says that it will be the strategy of selling their tourism product that will be altered. The very specific character of the islands will be highlighted, each developed based on its own culture and heritage, experiences that many visitors were not able to discover when spending their entire vacation by the pool or by the beach.
"Greece will launch a specialized, forward looking campaign within and outside Greece," said Spiliotopoulos, "we have to break free of unidirectional notions of sand, sea and sun. We have to look towards more open tourism model so that we can sell for more months of the year. We have to act like a mega-brand, and create this image."
