Inter- and intra-regional tourism disparities in Greece: trends and impacts for balanced regional development

Abstract

The ongoing deep recession has largely affected the great majority of economic activities in Greece in the primary, secondary and service sector. Not surprisingly, therefore, tourism is not an exception to this pattern although any generalization should be treated with caution due to the complex character of the particular activity and the inherent asymmetries between domestic and inbound tourism. For this reason, the present paper aims at investigating the impact of the Greek economic crisis on inbound and domestic tourism flows (measured by nights spent in hotel accommodation establishments) in Greece at NUTS2 (i.e. periphery) and NUTS3 (i.e. prefecture) levels using also supportive evidence from a hotel supply point of view. Based on different spatial indexes, the paper assesses the tourism profile of each spatial unit under consideration and studies patterns of regional tourism concentration (convergence and divergence) for the period 2005-2012. Building on the results, a new geography of tourism seems to emerge in Greece where the clear losers are those regions, which had specialized predominantly in domestic tourism. From a policy perspective, this stresses the need to expedite the internationalization of the tourism profile of the regions in question to overcome the adverse effects of the economic crisis.