Page 30 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.81, # 1, 2024, pp. 22-39

Most Greek tourism enterprises have their websites with description of their services,
although other website functions are usually less widespread. Using more than 1 language
on the websites helps to target foreign tourists. Social networks are the second most
important digital marketing channel, which is mostly used to promote a company, its
products and to find out customers’ opinion. Accommodation enterprises favoured more
online booking, payment for consumer targeted advertising on the internet and
multimedia content sharing websites than travel agencies and similar enterprises. A much
smaller share of businesses use mobile applications, blogs or microblogs. Paid targeted
advertising on the internet and using multimedia content sharing websites have been
largely growing in popularity in recent years. Websites and social networks were already
well-established marketing tools about a decade ago. Total imports of advertising and
marketing research services by Greece from the EU was almost stable in 2012-2017
(33-41 million euro) and then grew to 70 million in 2019 and 114 million euro. Despite
that indicator is not only for tourism enterprises, it is assumed that tourism sector
depends on the overall country brand of Greece, which is promoted by advertising
various sectors of Greek economy at least indirectly.

Input-output data for 2021 shows that the sectors related to tourism (Accommodation
and food service activities; Travel agency, tour operator reservation service and
related activities; Creative, arts and entertainment activities; libraries, archives,
museums and other cultural activities; gambling and betting activities; Sports
activities and amusement and recreation activities) imported advertising and
marketing research services from the EU with a value 6.4 million euro and the services
of Travel agencies, tour operators reservation service and related activities from the
EU with a value 13.2 million euro. The similar purchases from the Greek advertising,
marketing and reservation businesses were 139 and 81 million euro.

Correlation coefficients between the inbound tourism indicators and marketing tools
can provide only very approximate estimation of their potential efficiency. Longer
time series are not available yet, especially for growth rates of tourism indicators and
change in the shares of enterprises using specific types of digital marketing tools.
Moreover, when the preceding and subsequent values were known, some missing
values were imputed using interpolation method. Therefore many correlations are
insignificant even when the effect is reasonably expected. Travel agencies’ e-
commerce sales, website use and online reservation systems have the only significant
correlations with arrivals of the EU tourists to Greece and their expenditure especially
for travels for personal reasons. The effect on business trips is by the expenditure and
not by the number of arrivals.

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