Tourism In Greece - Essay Example

In the spirit of this ancient tradition of hospitality, contemporary Greece has instituted a tourist industry of considerable magnitude and the country has been continuously classified among the world’s most popular tourist destinations. The spectacular range and enormity of Greece’s tourist attractions encompass natural beauty, rich history and culture. A plethora of mainland destinations along with fifteen thousand kilometres of coastline and over two thousand five hundred islands which are spread out into the Ionian and Aegean Archipelagos add to the country’s unique attributes.

These have also been responsible for transforming the country into a vacation spot of international calibre (Apostolopoulos: 72). However, Buhalis (p.441) states that Greece is one of the most remote, peripheral, insular and poor economic regions of the European Union. Its tourism requires urgent strategic management action in order to compete with alternative destinations and maximise the prosperity of the host population. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and critically analyse the process of tourism in Greece.

It also proposes to identify areas that require changes, and methods to improve tourism in Greece, which is a popular destination for international tourists. The phenomenal expansion of tourism development since the 1960s has transformed the basis of socioeconomic structure, altering the country’s life chances and welfare, accompanied by adverse sociocultural and ecological ramifications (Apostolopoulos: 72). Tourism continues to be the foremost economic sector of Greece, though it constitutes a statistically invisible industry in the midst of international geopolitical and economic reshuffling.

Within this international framework and without overlooking the crisis phase of traditional, mass charter Greek tourism model, the multifaceted dimensions of Greek tourism needs to be critically reviewed. The focus will be on production and consumption