According to the World Economic Forum’s Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2017, Greece is has made a most impressive move to capture 24th place among world destinations. With efforts directed at natural resources and satisfying digital demand, the Greek tourism sector shows budding promise compared with recent years.
On the whole, Greece climbed a total of 7 places within the index largely due to the aforementioned efforts combined with the country’s marketing activity. Price and competitiveness being key factors as well, the WEF report also revealed the downside for Greek business’ revenue wins. According to the detailed report, Greece tourism is still currently a “mixed bag” with regard to the real positives for Greeks. Greece scored extremely high with regard to health and hygiene (11th), touristic service infrastructure (18th), and in prioritizing tourism and travel (15th). The area in need of the most improvement was the business environment of Greece (103rd).
Greece climbs to position 24 worldwide – World Economic Forum Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index 2017
The forum report suggests that Greece should “focus on making its business environment (103rd) friendlier, with lower impediments to FDIs, reduced taxation on profits and enhanced efficiency of the legislative system”. The experts at the WEF also recommended Greek businesses ramp up efforts to “become more ICT ready (51st)”. According to this report, and to our own studies, Greek businesses still make little use of new technologies for business-to-business (98th) and business-to-customer (82nd) transactions. Improving its visa policies (73rd) is another measure that would impact revenues and international arrivals. Greece had 23,599,455 international tourist arrivals, with some $15.6 billion in inbound tourism receipts and an average of $664 dollars per visitor.
Finally, the report suggested Greece improve visa policies (73rd) in order to impact revenues and international arrivals with little financial investment required. Other nations like Spain, which maintained its 1st place ranking worldwide, won out largely on the back of both cultural (2nd) and natural (9th) resources, combined with sound tourism service infrastructure (2nd).