Strategic Innovative Marketing and Tourism

European Works Councils (EWCs) have been present in most of the large airline carriers in the European Economic Area (EEA) since EWC Directive 94/45/EC in the mid 1990s. As privatization of the national EEA airlines and increased competition have occurred, the number of airline EWC agreements has decreased. There are now only three EEA major multinational airline groups with EWC agreements (Air France KLM; Lufthansa Group; International Airlines Group). The two EEA major discount airlines (Ryanair and easyjet) have recently added EWCs, but copies of these agreements are not available for analysis. Labour conflicts have plagued the EEA airline industry for the past three decades which has created work environments of low trust and frequent strikes. Until pay equity and working condition issues are resolved within the EEA airline conglomerates, it is unlikely that their EWCs will be able to contribute effectively to improving organizational outcomes.

From the array of definitions available for a smart city, the main buzzwords associated are technology; information; governance and management; economy; people and society; infrastructure and public services; education and training; innovation; sustainability; and quality of life. So, it is a multidisciplinary concept that serves as the basis for a natural development to the next level in the contemporary era of tourism—the smart tourism destination. Ponta Delgada, the largest Azorean city, serves as the motto for this case study. This city, located in a small island territory, is developing a series of efforts based on the smart city paradigm. The research (grounded on an initial survey to test the concept) has shown that the majority of the respondents does not recognize Ponta Delgada as a smart city and is much more concerned about sustainability and mobility, and expects improvements for the city regarding waste and residuals’ treatment; public transportation; green spaces; cycle routes; less cars; and urban infrastructures. On the contrary, the tourism destination promotion is not rated as a priority, although the Strategic Plan for Tourism Development of Ponta Delgada 2017–2021 states the importance of tourism as giving new socioeconomic perspectives and better preparation for sustained success.

The prospects for sustainable development in future cities are directly linked to the current smart city strategies. With cutting-edge internet and the co-sponsorship of other software, innovative systems are being developed on issues such as transport, health, culture, education, and consequently tourism. These systems are defined by numerous factors such as economy, environment, specific area of a region, etc. However, the success of such systems requires absolute cooperation between state and private factors to draw together a single strategy. The introduction of new technologies that facilitate and enhance long-distance links to tourism offer new horizons to tourism businesses. Printed media can be user friendly and can also provide to users quick and direct information.

Urbanization is in a phase of rapid growth around the world, as more people want to live in the city lights with more opportunities for growth and success. On one hand cities are developing like never again in the history of cities, in order to accommodate this development and in this process the idea of the smart cities were put into action. On one hand, tourism follows modern developments, innovation in hardware, software and network development applications. Can the use of these new technologies, smart tourist cities respond directly and effectively to tourism needs and overcome their competitors and maintain their long-term prosperity? This paper discusses the prospect of integrating smart features into the tourist product through a descriptive sample survey on a sample of potential tourists.

In the age of immense technological developments, a large percentage of tourists, regardless of age, educational level and place of residence, seek knowledge and dynamic interaction in communication and processing of data to the visitor of the tourist area. The development of new technologies as well as the need of the tourist market with increasing demands (qualitative and quantitative) began to redefine the term of packaging (in the wider context of the concept) to the new data. In the field of tourism, the concept of intelligent packaging identifies systems and applications implemented by the packaging industry. Through the new information systems, new communication relationships between transmitter and receiver, tourists and exhibits are supported. The scientific space of Marketing promotes and upgrades, through the technological developments of intelligent systems, to tourism, as a dynamic tool, adapting the new needs of tourists, to the capabilities offered by intelligent systems that mainly concern mobile phone communication. Through new approaches to intelligent communication systems, new interactions are supported. The new formulas that exist on many levels in our society, combined with the innovative developments in electronic communication, shape the human culture and approach of the tourist visitor.

Tourism and archaeological sites can benefit from the science of Cultural Informatics combined with the intelligent ticket. This paper presents the transformation of an ordinary ticket into an intelligent one with the incorporation of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology to communicate with user’s mobile devices through the use of AR (Augmented Reality) for audiovisual information with correspondence from a specific geographic position. The research approaches and adapts the technological evolution, communication, and dissemination of cultural information to benefit populations and special groups. The importance of receiving the necessary information to gain knowledge from the intelligent ticket is stated. A theoretical model of combining the intelligent ticket, audiovisual science and archeology with user interactions for cultural heritage is developed. Managerial implications for future practical implementation are discussed.

Cultural tourism helps with the preservation or revival of culture and traditions. It includes many different attractions including performing arts and festivals. Since folk dances are part of cultural heritage and their preservation has major importance, this paper presents applications for visualization and learning of folk dances. Based on different interactive motion capture technologies, new approaches for observing, analyzing and learning dances, and movements in general, have been created. A popular approach for learning purposes is to record a professional dancer using motion capture technologies and then visualize the dance. Users are supposed to watch and imitate the teacher’s performances. In this paper, a similar approach is proposed, where users can choose the dance they want to watch through an interactive interface, and they can see the teacher’s avatar performing the chosen dance. At the same time the avatar of the user can be seen, and users can track their performance. For recording teachers’ and users’ dance performances, an optical motion capture system, namely OptiTrack, has been used. The dance performance of the teacher is pre-recorded off-line, while users’ performance is recorded and streamed in real-time to the application. Through the interface, users can choose to watch different folk dances and different ways of visualization for learning purposes.

The Greek National Electronic Public Procurement System (ESIDIS) was developed with the aim to provide direct supplies of goods and services for the public administration more effectively and efficiently. The paper aims at investigating the factors that influence users’ satisfaction from ESIDIS. Usefulness, ease-of-use, risk perception and willingness-to-learn were investigated. A structured questionnaire was used for empirical research. The regression model shows the existence of an important prediction model between three independent variables (usefulness, ease-of-use, and willingness-to-learn) and user satisfaction (dependent variable). The resulting regression model can be used to predict user satisfaction when interacting with ESIDIS.

Tourism has been recognized as an essential industry to Islands’ development and growth. Islands’ diversity and uniqueness had posed various challenges and brought them to light in terms of relevance in the industry. However, most of the research in tourism has been more focused on mainland destinations, although there are several researchers studying islands as well. This paper focused on analyzing tourism and hospitality journals indexed in Scopus and belonging to the first and second quartiles within a period of 18 years (from 2000 to 2017). A concept map based on the selected articles was elaborated including the analysis of 13 associated themes, constituting one of the first literature review to map the research that has been conducted within the realm of tourism in islands.

Hospitality industry has undergone many changes in the past years, reflecting the sharing economy and customer digital empowerment effects. In this context, the excellence of service provided is a key success factor. This study investigates the themes related to people influence in tourists’ perception of service quality. The proposed model assesses the influence of human resource management on employee behavior and the latter in tourists’ service quality perception in the hospitality sector. The results obtained allow to conclude that human resource management plays an important role, by placing efforts in frontline employees’ values and attitudes and consequently shaping service encounters.

This study aims to test and validate the mediating role of organisational harmony and fellow feelings in the relationship between market orientation and organisational performance across two national contexts—China and Indonesia. The relevant theoretical framework suggests that when market orientation (intelligence generation, dissemination and response implementation) is used as a determinant of business performance, organisational harmony emerged as the most significant contributor to organisational performance. For the present study a dataset of 108 Chinese and 67 Indonesian responses gathered via convenience sampling from senior managers and the multi-level sequential mediation path analysis is used to examine the above mediating role. The results from the multi-group analysis (MGA) of the above relationship between China and Indonesia demonstrate that the research framework’s implications did not differ between the two countries. The findings of this paper contribute to the relevant theory by testing and validating fellow feeling and organisational harmony suggesting managers as well to devote resources on building harmonious organisations.

Refugee crisis has gone hand in hand with the unprecedented economic and social crisis the Greek society has been recently facing. We strongly believe that sustainable development could be a catalyst to the aforementioned problem with respect to immigrant innovation and entrepreneurship. Starting with European immigration policy, we are proceeding with a theoretical review of refugee integration. Following, we describe forms of informal entrepreneurship and innovation. Finally, we consider an account of the context that refugees face with regards to problems, challenges and good practices of innovation and entrepreneurship in Greece and more broadly in Europe. Sustainable development requires entrepreneurship and innovation as a way out from policies, which rely on social benefits and see the foreigner as an outsider from the social fabric.

This study develops and tests a model with complex relationships between brand cocreation and brand immersion as well as what affects them and what they affect in return. Considering cafe brands as micro destination brands, it is expected that both macro destination brand factors, namely sense of place, sense of community, and place attachment as well as the sense of brand community of the café brands will influence both café brand cocreation and immersion. In return, both café brand cocreation and immersion are expected to influence well-being of the consumer and the café brand.

The city branding has been very successful in recent years. There is an increasing number of cities, countries or regions that have invested in territorial brands. The theoretical field of city branding is very young and still in development. Several questions still remain and for which answers are needed. The aim of this article is to study the relevance and the role of city branding. The idea is to start with a review of literature of city branding and its role in place development to construct a grid of analysis and observation of place branding. This observation grid makes it possible to observe and analyze the branding experiences.

The phenomenon of city branding has become global. City branding is the creation of a brand for places to improve its attractiveness. The goal of this research is to study the city branding theory based on Casablanca branding experience. The idea is to start with a review of literature of city branding and its role in place and to analyze the new city brand of Casablanca in Morocco. The objective is to determine the conditions of success of a city brand and to make recommendations to the managers of Casablanca to improve the image of the city of Casablanca.

The tourism sector functions under intense competition and accommodation consist of an essential factor of satisfaction from a tourist destination as previous research have shown. While tourist destination and hotel satisfaction have been extensively studied, focus on satisfaction exclusively from the room attributes is an understudied subject. This paper presents the outcome of research regarding satisfaction from hotel room attributes. Specifically, it explores gender differences related to hotel room attributes and characteristics as regards satisfaction. The targeted population consists of the Greek generation Z cohort (N = 324). Data analysis involved descriptive statistics, reliability, factor analysis with Principle Component Analysis (Varimax Rotation), as well as non-parametric analysis. Factor analysis reduced the items to four dimensions and the Independent Samples Mann-Whitney U test revealed gender differences for two out of four dimensions, i.e., the Core room attributes, and Value for money dimension. Discussion based on results and hotel communication techniques is pointed out for hotels’ marketing strategy.

The scope of this paper is to investigate whether or not the renewable energy influences the tourism industry in the case of BRICS plus Turkey countries. Due to the fact that the primary energy source in these countries is fossil fuels, this has risen up a serious concern on environmental issues. The motivation to select these countries lies in the fact that all of these six have recorded an exponential economic growth in the last few decades. As a consequence, the standard of living has been increased as well as the energy consumption. Thus, the annual panel data are collected in the period between 1995 and 2015 in the case of BRICS countries plus Turkey to explore the link of interest. We have employed the panel VAR methodology. The most important findings suggest a response of tourism industry to renewable energy to be significant and negative. However, this negative relationship holds true in the short-run while the long-run impact tends to be positive. These results can be of great importance for policy makers, thus this paper summarizes in detail the policy implications.

The trend of new product development taking into account a customer’s feeling and needs has become very important for companies’ development and competition in the market. Kansei engineering is a consumer-oriented technology that seeks to capture the voice of the customer to produce a successful product. This method helps to transform customers feeling into the design parameters. In order to improve customer satisfaction, it is very important to determine the design parameters that make up the product. This paper presents a design support system intended for use in designing new product. A product has a lots of design attributes. For this reason, the product design attributes are reduced with Rough sets theory and main design attributes are obtained for developing a new product. Rough sets theory deals with uncertain or conflicting data. After determining product design attributes, the different products are produced for evaluating customer’s feel with Kansei adjectives. Customer evaluations were conducted using the semantic differential method to examine the relationship between users’ assessments of product and design elements. Kansei results are analyzed by applied Principle Component Analysis to determine the relationships between products and emotions that affect the general preferences of customers. Baby cradle design is taken as a case study; but this method can be used to develop other products. As a result, this paper presents a design support system intended for use in designing new product, so the designed product can fit more closely to the consumers’ desires.

This paper takes a look at historical trends and patterns of work-integrated education in Russian Federation as it transitions from planned to market economy. Prior literature and historical data on using “factory-to-college” educational system in planned Soviet economy illustrate the unique approach to integrating experiential learning into higher education. The methods of experiential teaching and learning have played the pivotal role in setting the pace of Soviet industrial development in 1920–1970s. Yet the system of work-integrated education had to be changed during the post-Soviet economic deregulation. The transition into market model of socio-economic development, and Russia’s integration into global economy called for new methods of work-integrated education. Implications of this change included the growing number of service-oriented programs, the earlier introduction of experiential learning, and the broader set of knowledge and skills offered to students.

In this paper we aim to discuss citizenship education along with the reflex and implications of the process in the people’s concept of citizenship. We reflect on and discuss citizenship education demand to clarify the notion of citizenship and the differences between this and civic education. Citizenship education is more global than civic education, because citizenship is constitutive of human identity development. Citizenship education in the twenty-first century requires an educational process to promote competencies development so that citizens are capable of acting with autonomy and conscientiousness in society. In fact, it is important that the educational process enable citizens to think critically about their duties and about laws in order to promote good social welfare. Beyond the political dimension, the social conjuncture of this millennium requires that citizenships also assume an ethical stance. Thus, it is important to understand how some European powers—Germany, Finland, France—as well as the United States conceive of being a good citizen.

This exploratory study investigates current accounting research with the aims: (a) to provide a picture of the evolutions in accounting technology that allow the reliable and real-time financial communication (b) to draw attention on the educational needs of future accountants by exploring whether there is a disconnect between technological trends in accounting reporting and accounting education. The research covered the period from 2013 to the first quarter of 2019 and reviewed the literature on technological accounting reporting tools and the literature on corresponding accounting education research. Comparison of research topics revealed four neglected topics in accounting education research: social media, big data, Blockchain technology and cloud accounting. The added value of this study is the identification of the research gap, the contribution towards their purposeful integration and the initiation of further research both for accounting reporting technologies and the accounting education research.

The aim of the present research is threefold: firstly, to investigate the environmental values of Business Administration and Accounting (BAA) students, secondly to explore their views on environmental education and thirdly to examine students’ attitudes towards social and environmental accounting (SEA). Data was collected by using a questionnaire distributed to the students of the Department of Business Administration and the Department of Accounting and Finance (BAA) of the University of West Attica. Results showed that students are environmentally sensitive. Environmental interest is found to be related to students’ perceptions of the importance of environmental education. Students have limited knowledge of the scope of SEA although they expressed their strong interest to learn more about this new accounting area acknowledging at the same time the important role of accountants in informing society about issues related to the environmental footprint of businesses.

Educational institutions worldwide are engaged in meeting the needs of lifelong learning of accounting professionals, graduates and prospective accountants. E-Learning Programs (E-LPs) aspire to be a driving force for developing skills since they integrate new technologies in order to support the communication between trainer and trainee in the best possible way. Greek Universities which implement E-Learning programs participate to this effort, through user-friendly learning platforms. This study uses a comparative approach in order to investigate similarities and differences of E-Learning Accounting Programs (E-LAPs) and skills development between Greek and Chinese Universities. The results show that China provides plethora of E-LPs leading to university degrees while Greece is rather focused on short courses and seminars. However, both countries should redefine the Accounting Education and Training to correlate the soft skills demand of modern enterprises with the provision of strong technical knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the Big-Five personality traits and risk aversion on entrepreneurial intention. A questionnaire-based survey was employed for the data collection. A total of 422 students and graduates (age 18–25) participated in the survey. The findings showed that extraversion, conscientiousness and risk aversion are important characteristics that influence entrepreneurial intention. Openness to experience, conscientiousness and extraversion have positive influence on entrepreneurial intention, while agreeableness, neuroticism and risk aversion have shown contrary results. The results confirm partially the theoretical approach and the hypotheses formed.

Thessaloniki’s recent attempts to transform into an extrovert and attractive urban destination, coincided with the anniversary celebrations and memorials of decisive historical events in the city’s past and the concomitant growing appetite of the public for delving into the city’s multilayered past. Along with numerous conferences, exhibitions, publications and lectures focused on a wide variety of specific issues, a different kind of guided tour undertook the challenge to negotiate the new fields of interest and to showcase less discussed aspects of Thessaloniki’s heritage, approaching from new points of view. An interview with the founder of “Thessaloniki Walking Tours”, the most active and sustainable partnership which offers thematic city walks and new “city experiences”, as well as a mapping of the topics that it covers, highlights the basic aspects and perspectives of this nascent city trend. Starting from the initial approach and the birth of original thematic city tours which are being implemented using innovative guiding techniques, the paper discusses the founder’s view on the market’s response and the possible reasons why new cultural products can lead to successful entrepreneurship in the fields of urban and cultural tourism. The recent expansion of Thessaloniki Walking Tours to Athens, along with trips that it organizes in Greece and abroad, reveal a possible preexisting—or a recently developed—interest of citizens in rediscovering their city, the need for new city experiences, as well as the potential of such platforms to reinforce human relations and create communities.

Film tourism is one of the most rapidly growing sectors of tourism industry. Recent years testimonials witness that top destinations have implemented successful marketing strategies of film tourism with a view of attracting more tourists. A film can provide a wide display promotion of a tourist destination. Indeed, the literature highlights a number of benefits for those countries which adopt film tourism practices. However, it is a perspective that has not yet been fully exploited by Greece despite the fact that the country offers a landscape of incomparable beauty, including various attractions and archaeological findings. Through a literature review and interviews of Greek stakeholders, this paper conducts a SWOT analysis and examines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats faced by Greece when adopting film tourism practices. Based on the main outcomes of the SWOT analysis, this study provides valuable insights for stakeholders involved about how to develop and promote a film tourism promotion. Finally, the paper sets the ground for future research about Greek tourist destinations and film promotion product practices.

Seasonality and its disciplines have been a central theme in tourism literature. This paper aims to examine the progress of research in Seasonality Tourism through the description of the main authors, papers and methodologies applied over the last 30 years, from 1987 until 2017. An in-depth review of published scholar papers was performed and a classification of the bibliography is presented in order to define and classify the research in Seasonality Tourism. The papers are sorted by (1) year of publication, (2) research methods applied and (3) geographical distribution of methodologies followed. The main interest of this study lies in the better understanding of the methodologies used over the last 30 years as a toolbox for future analysis of tourism seasonality.

The quality of education in a country is not superior to the quality of its teaching staff. If the teacher is the key to the quality of teaching, it is necessary that the educational action of the teachers is improved taking into consideration a specific social and cultural context, and specific educational and work conditions. Likewise, as part of the Accreditation Council of the Teaching of Engineering, CA (CACEI), the design of engineering, the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences should be evaluated. This is a process that can refer to safety, environmental and social factors. In complementary courses it must include sustainable development, the impact of technology on society, care for the environment, professional ethics, etc. From this perspective, this article exposes the importance of the incorporation of energy focused on the life cycle in the projects and subjects that the teacher has in the Higher School of Computing.

In 2018 Mexico occupied the sixth place worldwide of the most visited countries this is a sample of the importance of the tourist industry in the country especially in the visited communities, many of these communities possess a wide principally cultural heritage which can be used as a product of commodification. The aim of the present research is to give a deep look to national tourism since it interacts with the cultural heritage finally to define its utilization as a product of tourist commodification. In the present research the tourism shows itself in numbers in Mexico like that also the concept of tourism, and cultural heritage for the comprehension of the topic, cultural, equally it is investigated in the relation of the cultural heritage with their utilization tourist, cases are exposed to commodification of the culture as a tourist product, demonstrating some problems and advantages that the activity has left in regions where tourism is an economically important activity for the local development. Since conclusion has that, the participation of the original groups performs great importance for the tourist management of the patrimonial resources, in a set with the actions thought by the government and the institutions involved with the tourist industry.

The paper aims to provide a proposal of training in topics for the curriculum sustainability of the program of engineering in systems of the escuela superior de cómputo of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México. In this sense, the Educational Model of the National Polytechnic Institute seeks to contribute to the sustainable development of the nation. For the purposes of this research, we previously conducted an investigation of teachers’ sustainability competencies, training received and implementation in the learning units via random sampling interviewing. This allowed us to validate the need to develop a training proposal that gives the teachers the basis to include it in their practice, since the process of redesigning takes place.

Building and maintaining brand equity is important and necessary in today’s hotel industry when the concept is considered to include all material and non-material values of business. Though there has been increasing discussion on brand equity building, majority of the existing studies have failed to build CBBE concept or define the specific dimensions of CBBE, especially in the hotel industry context. Since the issue of customer based-brand equity has come up as one of the most important aspects of branding, different CBBE models and dimensions have been introduced over last three decades. Therefore, related literature has introduced various CBBE models. The purpose of this research is to review different customer-based brand equity models from academic literature to have a more integrative conceptualization for understanding brand equity in hotel industry. Based on the literature review, it has indicated that there are more demands for further investigations of CBBE models in the context of constantly changing customer needs and hotel industry and this perspective enables marketing managers to use an effective strategy in understanding and influencing customer attitudes and behaviors.

The teacher is regarded as the true pillar of the integration of information and telecommunication technologies in education in general. Notwithstanding the many studies that have been conducted to explain the factors of ICT adoption by teachers in higher education in Morocco, few have developed a model that statistically examines the interactions between different factors. By adopting the UTAUT model of Venkatesh et al., and adding two new variables to the model; the type and modalities of access to the institution, we try to identify the determinants of ICT integration and behavioral intent. Our model explains 60.2% of the total variance of intention to use ICT, and 21.6% of the total variance in use behavior.

The importance of collective action and the power of the natural wealth of a place are two factors that could be considered critical for the survival of a society. At a time when the Internet is an essential component of everyday life, pictures, images and information that individuals receive are common to all regions of the world. Through globalization occurs disappearance of local characteristics, customs and traditions of each place and forms a uniform perception of things and eventually a common aesthetic people. At such a time the places that have remained unchanged and far from this reality are examples of authenticity and challenge for many. Such places are the areas that have been abandoned and have preserved their structure and aesthetic value. The revival of such areas could be an element of development of experiential and cultural tourism interest. Using the principles of agrotourism and through the living experience of habitation, the concept of collective living can be redefined. The purpose of this study is to highlight the way of revival and recovery sites have been abandoned in the past 40 and more years, through the example of «Katomeri» settlement in Trikeri in the prefecture of Magnesia. In a small and remote area, like Triker, the bonds created between people and their needs for a self-sustaining society have led to the formation of a collective way of action. The inhabitants of this village have created in the past a settlement in the place where their crops were located. There they built small churches where many families lived together in different periods. This settlement at the time of urbanization was abandoned and ruined as in many other areas of rural Greece. So in the last few years what can be seen are these huts, to dissolve day by day. The results of this research resulted from the local observation and recording of the local data but also from the largest local “encyclopedia”, the village square, where older people carry the stories of the place to young people. The imprinting of the buildings of the settlement was carried out in the framework of the dissertation entitled “The Old Habits” to be used as a case study.

The design of spaces and products for tourism invests on memorable experiences and sense of place. Identity is of major significance in defining uniqueness in touristic products. It is contextual and related to local, spatial, cultural and material characteristics, and values that are reflected to the designed environment. Spaces and their elements are invested with meaning and as such are experienced by tourists through sensory, emotional, and cognitive perception. Within this process the designer has to capture the intangible and tangible values that a place and its people have to offer and transform them into the material substances that tourists experience. The conceptual development within the design process and the segmentation of the elements that the designer has to take in mind, while designing for tourism, are essential. The different scales of the designed environment, from building design to objects, stimulate the storage of information related to heritage, cultural identity and place that will be remembered by tourists and create anticipation during and after their trip. So, design affects to a great extent tourism success. The aim of this study is to clarify the relation of the above subjects to the design discipline. A number of contemporary case studies of large, medium and small scale designed products related to tourism are analysed under a semiotic perspective to justify and visualize the attempt.

Analysis of human motion is an important research area in computer vision with numerous applications. Recent projects, such as EU i-Treasures and TERPSICHORE projects conduct research in this field to improve the capture, analysis and presentation of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) using ICT-based approaches. The final goal is to document these forms of intangible heritage and to capture the associated knowledge in order to safeguard and transmit this information to the next generations. In addition, these approaches can give rise to new services for research, education and cultural tourism. They can also be used by creative industries (e.g. companies performing film, video, TV or VR applications production), as well as by local communities, creating new local development opportunities by promoting local heritage. This paper first reviews some very recent state of the art approaches based on deep learning which can achieve impressive results in recovering human motion (2D or 3D) and structure (skeleton with joints or realistic 3D model of the human body). Based on such approaches, we then propose a dance analysis approach, currently under development in TERPSICHORE project. Preliminary results are presented and, finally, some conclusions are drawn.

The present study draws the attention to the still persistent problem of application of strategic marketing, targeted marketing communications, in the nonprofit sector, primarily to non-governmental, non-profit organizations, with its focus on the specifics of the present times. Marketing communications represent a set of tools for commercial and non-commercial communication with the market the common goal of which is to support the company’s marketing strategy in conjunction with the need to inform and influence consumers as effectively as possible. However, it is necessary for the non-profit entities to become fully aware that without professional marketing experts, they cannot achieve their victories in an increasingly concurrent struggle. Here, the role of higher education plays an essential role then, with an important aspect being the increasing permeability between the general (academic) and vocational training that helps universities reach new target groups and thus better meet the labor market expectations and demands. A part of the contribution is, based on the results of research surveys on the one hand with non-governmental, nonprofit organizations in continuity with the reflection of the perception of students of the Faculty of Multimedia Communications at Tomas Bata University in Zlin, also the presentation of one of the options for the development of innovation activities in marketing and marketing communications in continuity with the creative approach of the students of the Faculty of Multimedia Communications at Tomas Bata University in Zlin.

Customer requirements for products are often volatile and influenced by culture or current trends. The role of designers is therefore not simple. They have to make serious decisions concerning two strong aspects—functionality and design (aesthetics of the design). These are not easy decisions. Moreover, designers have to take into consideration customer requirements. This study gives insight into how university students—young designers—perceive the importance of specific aspects of product design. This article aims to determine the most important aspects of designing products by young designers who are future graduates of applied arts. To achieve the goal, the article is based on the partial outputs of the research conducted through a questionnaire survey in 2018. Altogether, 136 university design students were approached. They were encouraged to share their preferences when deciding on customer requirements in the following aspects: overall visual appearance of the product, ergonomic aspects, aesthetic aspects, functionality, manipulability, and selection of material. Furthermore, students were asked to deal with customer preferences from the ecological, economic, aesthetic, functional, and technological point of view. To evaluate the obtained data, descriptive statistics is used. In addition, the ANOVA test is applied too in order to measure the differences tested for statistical significance in the 5% significance level between opinions of the investigated statement and a view of customer product preferences from the perspective of young designers. The presented outcomes of the research are useful for understanding the attitudes that the generation of young designers has towards the design in general, more specially towards the design process, and most importantly towards complex design thinking showing their new, modern, and innovative approach in terms of customer engagement.

Small and medium-sized municipalities in regions, where former industry collapsed (coal mines closed, manufacturing transferred to cheaper countries, etc.) are facing outflow of people in productive age and brain drain. This results in an aging population, and even lower attractiveness for youngers to stay or to come, despite wonderful nature around and potential for tourism. Our research aims to understand both the reasons for such development and real needs of the region and people living there. Improving the living comfort of local people, focus on how to support attractiveness for tourists. Design of infrastructure for young families, seniors, bikers, make better connection and marketing of beautiful surroundings may be way, how to move forward. The aim of the article was to determine the possibilities of increasing the comfort and attractiveness of selected municipalities for current and potential residents and tourists. Our research was focused on two medium-sized municipalities, with a different past background. Outputs may be generalized and suggestive for other municipalities worldwide.

Tourists incoming to smaller remote regions, and to small and medium-sized municipalities in these regions becomes an issue. These municipalities not only face the question of how to increase their attractiveness for tourists, but also for the inhabitants themselves. The population in such small and medium-sized municipalities has a downward trend, for reasons of leaving for work. In this way, the so-called aging regions and the share of the older generation of people are growing. The development of tourism would be a partial solution to increase the occupational capacity of the population. The aim of the article is to determine the possible setting of the use of mental maps, which will be the basis for an effective strategic plan to develop the attractiveness of the Milevsko region within tourism. The article is based on the analysis of the secondary data of the region, analysis of the trends in the area, statistical data, results of the already implemented Milevsko map and interviews with the municipality representatives. The Milevsko microregion is an ideal area for rest and recreation, especially thanks to the large number of culturally historical monuments, charming landscape, pleasant climatic conditions, easy accessibility and peaceful rural character.

Social Networking Sites are now considered to be a crucial channel of marketing communication with consumers. Food firms and food brands, use them intensively in order to promote them and earn market share in this difficult and competitive market. In order to promote food products through SNS, brand posts should attain high levels of engagement, as it is also true in other industries. The aim of this research is to assess the factors that increase engagement levels of food brand’s Facebook posts. More specifically, 12 brand pages concerning food products, and 501 posts are examined, to find the features of posts that drew the attention of consumers. Our results suggest that the vividness of content (images), posting in working days, and positive/negative reactions increase the engagement levels and the popularity of posts, while status, videos and posting time does not have a significant effect on the engagement levels and popularity of a post. Our results provide insight in realizing how users engage with brand posts in Facebook using reactions, especially for food products, and offer suggestions for further research.

Blockchain is one of the most prominent and discusses technologies of the twenty-first century that has the potential to change, the way that we are conducting business, payments, and the management processes in a big number of industries. Based on the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), blockchain applications provides a breakthrough and innovative solutions due to the security they offer to the participants of the network, the efficiency of record keeping and transaction execution, and the automation solutions in terms of executing contracts when certain conditions are met (smart contracts). Despite the fact that most literature concerning blockchain focuses on its use in the finance industry and cryptocurrencies, there is a growing interest in the ways that this technology could be applied in other industries and management processes as well, both in the private and the public sector. In this paper, we are going to review the main propositions and findings in the literature concerning the use of blockchain technology in tourism and tourism marketing. We identify potential uses of blockchain in the tourism and hospitality industry in general and outline the benefits derived, and the challenges that will arise from the adoption of this innovative technology. Finally, we point out some direction for future research on the topic.

Health tourism is one of the sectors that includes two important branches, medical tourism and wellness-spa tourism and forms with the dynamism of health and tourism together. Today, the obstacles to accessing the health system, long waiting lists, the lack of diagnosis and treatment with new technology in countries of people, the desire to get quality health services at a more affordable cost, as well as vacationing or seeing different holiday destinations increase the demand for medical tourism. In this study, it is aimed to compare and evaluate the health tourism potential of the European Union, which has the third largest population in the world, in the context of medical tourism. France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Poland are economically important health tourism destinations. More than three-quarters of EU health tourism revenues are only among these five countries.

The contribution of Telepsychiatry and its applications to the national health care systems of the countries is particularly important, with positive effects according the reviewing bibliography. It is characterized by efficiency as a service with high quality rates and is the only solution for patients from remote areas to contact and access with the providers in the mental health system. Our article highlights the importance of Telepsychiatry minimizing the cost of traveling. Because of reduced published articles in the field our study is also measuring the technology acceptance by Health care professionals of the Psychiatric Sector in Greece. Finally, there are interview responses to four queries derived from the existing literature and experience about the factors influencing the spread of the use of Telepsychiatry and the reduced amount of published articles.

This paper investigates what citizens perceive as the quality that hospitals must have by rating 28 quality indicators deriving from literature and qualitative research. It focuses on a sample that was treated by the General Hospital of Kavala, Greece. The field survey used a structured questionnaire and was distributed to a sample of 448 patients that received medical services provided by at the General Hospital of Kavala. Results reveal directions for achieving future patient satisfaction in the health care system and specifically from public hospitals.

The wine sector in Europe can be considered as a key sector for the economy alongside Europe. Τhe wine industry composed by micro and small companies, as family businesses. Isolation and limited access alongside the lack of networking and access to learning opportunities are the main problems of the sector. The Wine Lab project is funded by the European Community programme Erasmus+ and is implemented to co-create knowledge, train employees and workers and innovate new methods of networking in the sector. This paper deal with the research undertaken in the frame of this project. The technique of the Delphi interviews has been implemented by the researchers. Twenty-four stakeholders from five countries participated. The field research was undertaken in two rounds. Participants discussed about the cooperation between research centres and the wine sector. Also participants identified the main problems that wine producers face. Finally, participants expressed their views on the main wine policies implemented in Europe.

Modern corporations invest time and resources to build a favorable image among consumers, using a vast array of communication channels. It is in the interest of companies to manage the impressions and perceptions of individuals in order to create or maintain a strong corporate identity. The present paper aims to identify and analyze the ways in which banks communicate and promote through their official website as an online impression management strategy. To achieve the goal, a descriptive research was conducted, using the content analysis as the research method. A theoretical sampling and a partially guided sampling method based on accessibility (availability) was carried out. The corpus of research was constituted by all the Romanian banks and the sample is represented by those banks that have an official website, resulting 18 cases. The research tool (analysis grid) contains five categories of information, based on the content and structure of the official websites of the selected banks. The study provides an overview of new media communication in the Romanian banking context, as they choose to communicate and promote themselves using the official website to create an online presence. From this point of view, they need to pay special attention to the structure, design and content of their site, because any symbol counts in creating an online reputation. Managers do not have to forget that the reputation in the online environment inevitably influences the offline one, so they should consider the opportunities for managing the impressions on the Internet.

Social media tools are viewed as important sources for the tourism sector and different types of consumers and travellers. This article presents the role and the impact of YouTube, as the main video sharing solution in the online environment, for the development of what is called prosumer, the user which generates, circulates and consumes online knowledge and being part of the participatory culture. The goal of this research is to investigate the extent to which social media and YouTube in particular appear to be part of the spreadable media phenomenon, the capacity of the information to be shared among users. The study used a research design by selecting the first 100 video clips promoted by YouTube and addressing the theme of Bran Castle (also known as Dracula Castle) from Braşov, Transylvania region in Romania, uploaded by different categories of users. For the analysis of the results, this paper used elements of descriptive statistics from YouTube and methods of quantitative content analysis, regarding the YouTube video characteristics such as the frequencies of views, comments, appreciations (likes, dislikes), channel subscribers etc. This study shows that YouTube is considered to be important for the development of the tourist industry as it provides travellers with new practices for choosing their destination after viewing video materials.

At the borders of academic and research fields of psychology, IT&C, advertising, marketing and many more, the notions of virtual experience and virtual product experience developed because technological advances are directing towards a movement involving multi-sensory interactions that introduce high-quality images, sound and 3D images. However, online stores are limited in terms of the sensory information they can provide. In a virtual environment, people simply cannot physically look at products before buying them and have to rely on information provided by the online seller. At the same time, the fact that there is no direct contact with the product can reduce the consumer’s pleasure, which has proven to be a very important thing in the online shopping experience. Starting from these considerations, the case study presented in this paper outline the developments introduced by ESUN 3D+, a company affiliated to Shenzhen ESUN Display Co., Ltd., which dedicates to 3D digitizing technology research and related ecosystem construction, offering solutions for 3D scanning, 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D design and manufacturing services, as well as 3D cloud platform.

This study sought to investigate the impact of social network advertisements on providing actual information about products. Moreover, it also explored the effectiveness of online advertising in reaching out to consumers. This study was carried out using quantitative method and an online survey of 202 users of social networks, was conducted. This study has concluded that social network platforms, particularly YouTube, are very effective tools for companies to reach out the masses at a rapid pace with high cost advantage. In this work it has been found that in social media marketing, the persuasion and the valuation of the brands are indirectly but positively related to influence the consumer motivation and intention to buy. The higher the brand value, the greater the purchase intention, similarly, the greater the commercial persuasion. The higher is the purchase intention, the higher the advertising on social networks, the greater the purchase intention. The greater the advertising on social networks, the greater the valuation of the brands.

This paper aims to explore whether winery visitors’ perceptions of experience constructs, their emotional stimulation, satisfaction, and intentions to revisit and recommend a winery differ in terms of age and previous winery experiences. The present study is one of the few studies that consider visitors’ experiences holistically, as a multi-dimensional and diverse construct, indicating that visitors’ experience perceptions are based on servicescape attributes, other visitors’ behaviour and their desire for learning and fun. A self-administered structured questionnaire was used and 615 usable responses were obtained. Results indicate that visitors with previous winery experience have greater perception of experience constructs, are more stimulated with positive emotions, are more satisfied from the experience and are more willing to revisit and recommend the winery. Those findings enhance the existing literature respective to experiential marketing, and wine tourism marketing by providing new insights.

The main aim of this article is to identify the factors affecting the level of tourist satisfaction in Pafos. Namely, the study proposes that these factors are quality of services, low cost, aesthetic appeal/nature and society/culture. A questionnaire was created and a random sample of tourist was selected in order quantitative analysis to be conducted. Appropriate statistical techniques were applied to investigate among others, the factor with the largest contribution to the overall tourist satisfaction in Pafos. In addition, the tourists intention to revisit Pafos was examined and its association with their overall satisfaction.

The twenty-first century’s global and technological society, full of information, requires reframing the concept of citizenship and the responsibilities of its citizens, particularly in the school context. It is important to promote the development of children and young people for their integration as active and critical citizens in the local and global communities in which they live in. As such, current education has a duty to educate for cyber-citizenship, that is, the duty to initiate children and young people in the use of new information and communication technologies, in order to understand the global reality in which they live in and to encourage them to intervene and to participate autonomously and responsibly. In this article, we reflect on the need for schools to educate cyber-citizens, analyzing and discussing how educators and teachers view new information technologies in the promotion of citizenship education, in order to understand whether educators and current teachers use the new technologies and communication in the promotion of citizenship, feel prepared to promote cyber-citizenship and already do so in their educational context. We note that cyber-citizenship is still not a current school reality.

Tourism industry in Turkey has been developing dramatically. Adapting online technologies to tourism industry have become inevitable and travel agencies have started to transform their brick and mortar businesses to click and mortar, even click-only businesses, since they prefer to be accessible everywhere in the world. Online travel agencies have become popular alternatives during online travel planning and booking. Consumers can only get information from online travel agencies or they can buy from these websites. The aim of this research was to analyze the characteristics of Gen Y customers’ internet usage, and show the relationships between word of mouth activities regarding online travel agencies and visit intention to online travel agencies. Within this aim, the questionnaire was created and conducted in Izmir City with 240 Gen Y customers chosen by convenience sampling technique in April, 2017. Descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and regression analysis were used in data analysis. Findings showed that 81.7% of customers preferred shopping from the internet and 82.5% of customers preferred booking a hotel online. As a result of factor analyses, one dimension arose for visit intention to online travel agencies and one dimension was obtained for word of mouth construct. To test the hypothesis, regression analysis was implemented to the constructs and it showed that word of mouth explained 49.3% of variance in visit intention to online travel agencies. Results showed that Turkish Gen Y customers were open to use online technologies in tourism industry. It was suggested to travel agencies to use online channels and pay attention to word of mouth activities of their customers for increasing visit intention.

Heritage settings generate often a spatiotemporal gap between the object and the audience, as the tangible form is perceivable by the eye, but the meanings are codified. This particular condition, further supported by cultural and mentality differences, impedes non-captive audiences to fulfill satisfactory experiences. Following Aristotelian hermeneutics we defend that the spatio-temporal gap in heritage settings is of cognitive nature. Thus, to understand and embrace heritage values and effectively bridge the gap between the object and the observer, we need to link the audience to heritage meanings and values. The supply side, is often unaware of the human cognitive architecture, thus narratives and descriptions stay codified in the expert language, while the demand side is looking for compelling stories and multisensory experiences. The still ongoing ERASMUS + Project 2018-1-TR01-KA203-058344 (TOURiBOOST) for Higher Education builds an attempt to design and test a knowledge acquisition pattern for non-captive audiences from a human cognitive architecture point of view. In this vein, we present the design for the production of a multimedia iBook presenting 30 heritage places in TR/HU/NL/IT/GR with the principal aim to create the enabling environment for both onsite and dislocated audiences to engage in critical thinking and inspire them to replace gazing and clicking with cognition and emotions.

Great value can be given to any old-school organization by providing its users with personalised experience. The present study aims at the use of innovative technology in libraries to enable the study and understanding of the libraries’ frequent visitors to better support them through the provision of enriched personalised experience. To support this goal, modern technologies such as recommendation systems, gamification and indoor localization techniques such as beacons will be used. Recommendation systems are the basis for providing personalised user experience since their task is to exploit user information (demographic information, habits, actions, likes and dislikes) to get to know each and every one of the users by building a profile for them. Gamification will also support the concept by enriching the user experience with game-like attributes to boost user engagement like rewarding the user with experience points for each library visit or for each book they check out. Finally, indoor localization techniques will be used to help the libraries manage the on-premises crowd to avoid congestion and to also help the libraries’ visitors have fruitful interactions with each other. The combined application of the aforementioned techniques can help the libraries grow alongside the technological advancements by exploiting them for the modernisation of their model.

Aegina is an island of rich culture. The aim of the present study is the strategic planning for the promotion of the cultural heritage through the implementation of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) for the promotion of the Kapodestrian buildings of the island of Aegina in Greece. First recording the historical Kapodestrian buildings of Aegina, then dimension the analysis of the organization’s environment, using SWOT analysis and suggestions for BMC implementation. The results of this study highlight the importance of some key success factors, such as the re-use of the historical Kapodestrian buildings in Aegina, the synergies and the formation of a strong rebranding strategy around cultural tourism.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have influenced the way people communicate and socialize in the twenty-first century. The aim of this paper is to clarify how cultural civic activism has been strengthened by social media platforms which nowadays are an essential part of every day’s life of people of all ages worldwide. Social media are important sources of mobilization of collective action and of the subsequent creation, organization and implementation of social movements around the world. Therefore, they can help to develop and promote a region by achieving different cultural tourism objectives. Based on the existing limited research on tourism literature related to social media activism and the theory of imagined communities a project in progress for Paleochora on the island of Aegina in Greece will be presented. Paleochora (also Paliachora) is a medieval village of Aegina built in the ninth century; it was the capital of the island until 1826. A small island, such as Aegina, would be expected to willingly use its cultural resources, in an effort towards sustainable socioeconomic development of the local community nowadays. Paleochora, the so called “Morea of the Saronic Gulf” stands devastated instead, surrounded by a landscape of unique beauty which remains untapped. The “Paleochora Prοject”, if successfully completed, will add social and educational value, and the implications could be the beginning of a process for sustainable development in the region.

Hotel enterprises, having facilities to respond customers’ high level of expectations, are profit oriented accommodation organizations in tourism sector. Changes in customers’ needs, expectations and wishes, competition, and changes in the market increase the necessity for hotels to become more customer and market-oriented. Hotels learn the unknown about customers and the market through market segmentation implementations and can define appropriate target market for their marketing strategies by segmenting the market into homogeneous groups. The theoretical basis of this study aims to reveal that the effect of market segmentation applications and target market determination strategy on their sales and occupancy in hotel enterprises. Based on the literature review, hotels applying market segmentation in their strategic marketing plans, have positive changes in their occupancy. The failure to apply with the market segmentation practices and target market strategies systematically and consciously, negatively affects the occupancy which is an indicator of the sales of hotels.

This scientific paper refers to the crucial issue of ‘climate change’ and how it affects monuments of cultural heritage, as individual material cultural goods, but also as cultural ensembles and landscapes. The aim of the paper is to bring this critical issue to the fore, and examine it as part of the island of Chios. It is clarified that, indirectly, the paper is about tourism and the sustainable development of the island, as its cultural heritage is a major factor for its image and its position in the global tourist market. Methodologically, the definitions of climate change and the existing data and effects are mentioned first. The list of the risks of rising sea levels and soil erosion follow. The goods of the cultural heritage of Chios are noted, and the level of risk is examined, based on climate change and its impact on the environment. As a conclusion, civil protection measures are proposed, specifically for the island of Chios, on the basis of international experience.

Competition among destinations for tourism steadily increased over the past few decades. Extant literature emphasizes tourist travel motivation, destination choice, decision making, and trends such as responsible tourism, medical tourism, and ecotourism. This study adds value with an empirical macro national approach that investigated relationships among tourist arrivals, national environmental performance, human development performance, and national effective governance (voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption). World Bank, World Economic Forum, and United Nations secondary data across 124 countries from 2016 were analyzed. Government effectiveness, political stability and absence of political stability and absence of violence, human development index and population were associated with the number of tourism arrivals. National environmental performance was not associated with tourism arrivals. Implications for future research and practice are offered.

Tourism is a growing worldwide industry, tourism marketing affects substantially the creation of a destination’s brand. In this respect event tourism affects both the cultural and social realm, that is developed by local events and festivals. Film festivals and cultural events for example, increases the popularity of a destination because of the promotion taking place through the film industry, and other cultural organization and communities. In this paper the effect that industrial design has in tourism and more specifically in the event tourism marketing is examined. More specifically a case study that focus on the design aspects and elements of a pavilion created for the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, is presented and the ways that it promotes the event and tourism through an innovative design approach. Through this case study, we aim to introduce an industrial design approach to tourism marketing from a strategic and experiential point of view.

There is no doubt that tourism is one of the most important economic activities worldwide. Also, it is a scientific field of study with growing relevance in the academic circle. Smart tourism and sustainable tourism are two contemporary trends of tourism development. The combination of both smart and sustainable tourism paradigms is a brand-new concept in which smart tourism’s pattern of technology, tourism and local development, and sustainable tourism’s principles of development and equity in the economic, environmental, social and cultural spheres, can bring much more advantages for tourism as an economic activity and for all the stakeholders involved. Through a bibliometric analysis, a method of content analysis and metrics that makes it possible to delineate conceptual evolutions and trends in scientific fields, a total of 19 papers were found covering the two tourism paradigms. The results presented (only part of a more complete and in-depth analysis) reveal that this investigation theme is still scarce, very recent and mainly produced in Europe.

Regardless the recognized importance of sustainable tourism, it still encompasses “grey areas” in what comprehends research, but above all in what concern commitment and application by the different stakeholders. This work attempts to contribute to a better understanding of tourism behavior regarding sustainable tourism. To unveil the answer to this question the latest database from Eurobarometer related to European attitudes toward tourism was used and the choosing behavioral pattern from the 28 countries was assessed.

The practices and actions undertaken by the tourism firms for the approach of their HR (Human Resources) are related to criteria which lead to the creation of a strong employer brand by creating a value proposition for it. Value proposition for a firm’s HR consists of its actions that will be appreciated by prospective or existing employees and will convince them to participate or stay with it. Such actions may be of an economic nature, such as good pay levels, bonuses and varied benefits may also be non-economic. Respect for diversity, mutual support and mutual understanding among workers, the creation of work-life balance and opportunities for personal and professional development are policies that aim to create an “employer of choice” where people will want to work and stay with him. In this paper we are exploring how hotel firms in tourism industry can develop engagement strategies by enhancing practices for creating an “employer branding” through the satisfaction of their HR.

The aim of this paper is to describe an approach to a sophisticated model of optimised subsets of data classification. This effort refers to a seemingly parallel processing of two algorithms, in order to successfully classify features through optimization processing, using a wrapping method in order to decrease overfitting and maintain accuracy. A wrapping method measures how useful the features are through the classifier’s performance optimisation. In cases where big datasets are classified the risk of overfitting to occur is high. Thus, instead of classifying big datasets, a “smarter” approach is used by classifying subsets of data, also called chromosomes, using a genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm is used to find the best combinations of chromosomes from a series of combinations called generations. The genetic algorithm will produce a big number of chromosomes of certain number of attributes, also called genes, that will be classified from the decision tree and they will get a fitness number. This fitness number refers to classification accuracy that each chromosome got from the classification process. Only the strongest chromosomes will pass on the next generation. This method reduces the size of genes classified, eliminating at the same time the risk of overfitting. At the end, the fittest chromosomes or sets of genes or subsets of attributes will be represented. This method helps on faster and more accurate decision making. Applications of this wrapper can be used in digital marketing campaigns metrics, analytics metrics, website ranking factors, content curation, keyword research, consumer/visitor behavior analysis and other areas of marketing and business interest.

In recent years, the concept of Βrand Personality is increasingly important in the tourism industry. The personality of businesses and destinations is analyzed by various researchers. The purpose of this study is to analyze the Brand Personality of Athens as a destination from the tourist’s perspective. A survey was conducted with a sample of tourists in 2018. A structured questionnaire in English was distributed to tourists in a central area of Athens. A total of 118 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed with SPSS. Results show that on the whole tourists are mostly positive and moderate in their evaluation of brand personality of Athens. Athens scores higher in the Charming dimension and is described as particularly cool, imaginative and sentimental. On the other hand, while the dimension Outdoorsy gets the lowest score Athens is perceived as wholesome. Furthermore, tourists feel that the brand personality of Athens lacks in the excitement dimension, especially in the exciting, original and cheerful characteristics whereas the best score in this dimension is young and spirited. Finally, the competence dimension shows that Athens is particularly feminine, friendly and intelligent but needs to be supported to enhance the characteristics of successful, confident and smooth. This study serves as a guide to the city of Athens in managing brand personality. Future research can extend the sample and provide a more detailed analysis of the Athens brand personality.

Physical activities in nature provide a series of important benefits for the physical, social and mental health, and well-being. Moreover, there is growing evidence regarding the benefits for people from direct contact with the natural environment. Outdoor sport activities are a type of exercise that is not difficult and appeals to all ages. Therefore, there is a growing interest in determining the motives of participants in outdoor sports. The purpose of this study is to explore the motives of participants in outdoor sport activities using self-determination theory. The Greek version of the Sport Motivation Scale (Pelletier et al., J Sport Exerc Psychol 17:35–53, 1995) was administrated to a random sample of 120 adults (64 males and 56 females), members of a naturalist club in the Attica region. The age of respondents ranged from 24 to 68 years old. Results show that the most significant motives are all three “intrinsic motivations” and the “extrinsic motivation of identification”, whereas amotivation scores are not significant. Also, gender analysis shows that females have stronger motives than men whereas a sex motivation multivariate analysis did not show significant results. The present study shows which motives are more important for outdoor sport participants and can provide guidance to all those who organize outdoor sport activities.

The global economic and financial crisis has greatly affected the socio-economic sectors and the quality of life of many countries and particularly of Greece. Initially, tourism in Greece has been affected by the current economic crisis but its positive impact on the economy, social, national and regional development of country has been, and is being, considerable. The purpose of the present paper is to examine how economic crisis influences residents’ attitudes toward tourism development. In order to achieve this aim, a primary quantitative research with the use of structured questionnaire has been conducted between August and October 2018. The sample of the survey consisted of 193 citizens of Kavala (Greece) selected by simple random sampling method. The results of the research display that the residents were aware the socio-economic impacts of tourism. In addition, they seem to be influenced by the economic crisis impacts and recognized the need that tourism should be strengthened as one of the key factors for the region’s economy. Findings and discussions of this research are useful to tourism industry practitioners as well as to academic researchers interested in tourism in time of economic crisis.

This paper presents a taxonomy of supervised machine learning techniques for intrusion detection systems (IDSs). Firstly, detailed information about related studies is provided. Secondly, a brief review of public data sets is provided, which are used in experiments and frequently cited in publications, including, IDEVAL, KDD CUP 1999, UNM Send-Mail Data, NSL-KDD, and CICIDS2017. Thirdly, IDSs based on supervised machine learning are presented. Finally, analysis and comparison of each IDS along with their pros and cons are provided.

Machine learning is more and more used in various fields of the industry, which go from the self driving car to the computer security. Nowadays, with the huge network traffic, machine learning represents the miracle solution to deal with network traffic analysis and intrusion detection problems. Intrusion Detection Systems can be used as a part of a holistic security framework in different critical sectors like oil and gas industry, traffic management, water sewage, transportation, tourism and digital infrastructure. In this paper, we provide a comparative study between twelve supervised machine learning methods. This comparative study aims to exhibit the best machine learning methods relative to the classification of network traffic in specific type of attack or benign traffic, category of attack or benign traffic and attack or benign. CICIDS’2017 is used as data-set to perform our experiments, with Random Forest, Jrip, J48 showing better performance.

Cultural Heritage assets are of great interest and value, as being an integral part of every civilization. Thus the conservation and protection of those assets remains an issue of particular interest. In the following approach, there are presented innovative low-cost methods sensing methods in order to measure the degree of decay and preserve the cultural heritage objects from deteriorating. New innovative actions will be applied, that can tune, configure and deliver “targeted” HSI and THz sensing interface addressing the particularities of Preventive Conservation actions, as defined from the interaction of the material with micro-climate conditions over time.

History of Technology (HoT) describes the invention of tools and techniques, and entails in many ways the history of humanity. Society evolution is strongly connected to technology evolution and vice versa. Thus, in order to better understand society, we need to grasp HoT. Although great effort is made on recording HoT and related topics, from various scopes (e.g. social, economic, geographic), little is done towards their connection in an efficient way and on the re-use of ICT tools to understand and verify ancient technological levels. The proposed framework exploits the recent advances in ICT technology and particularly in (1) 3D precise digitalization, (2) computer vision, (3) computer graphics, (4) multimedia analysis and (5) cross media production to exhibit the spatial and temporal relations of ancient technological levels (social status quo, engineering levels, production cycles, economy, materials, manufacturing methods and tools, etc.). It focuses on the ancient technology developed in Mediterranean basin from the Semite tribes (located in the today region of Jordan), the ancient Greek civilization and how is affected from the Semitic technologies up to the Hellenistic period, the early Latin civilization up to the Greek colonies in the Iberian peninsula.

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) includes the practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill, as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts, and cultural spaces that are considered by UNESCO to be part of a place’s cultural heritage. Intangible cultural heritage is considered by the Member States of UNESCO in relation to the tangible World Heritage focusing on intangible aspects of culture. Terpsichore project aims to, analyse, design, research, train, implement and validate an innovative framework for low cost digitisation, modelling, archiving, e-preservation and presentation of ICH content related to traditional dances, in a wide range of users. The Department of Physical Education and Sport Sciences of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was involved in the performance of Greek traditional dances and the three-dimensional capturing. We performed three-dimensional recordings at the Laboratory of “Motor Behaviour and Adapted Physical Activity”. For data capturing, we used the Vicon 3D recording system. Six traditional Greek dances from different regions of Greece were performed and captured. The results of the three-dimensional capturing of movement showed that the assessment of foots’ movement through markers gives us the ability to identify Greek traditional dances. Finally, we distributed data from the recordings to the project partners in order to further analyse them for the fulfilment of the project objectives. With the completion of Terpsichore project, a bundle of services will have been created, including virtual and augmented reality applications, interactive maps, presentation and learning of traditional European dances with a significant impact on European society culture and tourism sector.

Accessibility, Tourism and Greece. How are these three words connected, collide or consistent? The concept of access takes its true value when talking about universal access to all sectors focused to the specific category of people with disabilities. Accessibility is everyone’s right. The right of access for people with disabilities to culture, tourism and entertainment is a fundamental human right, and is directly related to their quality of life and their ability to participate in social activities and in that way should be dealt by the State and its law enforcement agencies, according to the Constitution of Greece. The need to participate in the tourism sport activities, the lack of access in the structured or not environment for the disabled groups of visitors, create misinterpretation and lack of guaranteed levels of services. In 2003, which was also the European Year for People with Disabilities, in the Council of Ministers of the EU the resolution on the Accessibility of people with disabilities to Cultural Infrastructure was adopted in many respects, including accessibility to travel and tourism. It was that year when the first official actions to build access to the ‘sea and sand’ were run in Greece under the guidance of the Ministry of Development. Since then many accessible beaches were created in many Greek places and structures has been used independently by people with disabilities. After a great number of beaches all over, the accessible beaches and bathing facilities remain minimal in number and location.

During the last decades, a large increase of the European wild rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) population (WRP), in Lemnos island (Greece), has become a significant problem, creating imbalances for the biodiversity and ecosystem of the island and inflicting damages in grain crops. This problem affects the local economy, imposing the need for actions that will set the WRP under control. In this paper we examine the social and economic aspects of the problem, surveying the perceptions of stakeholders in the island on the ways that the problem should be addressed. Many local stakeholders view hunting as viable and sustainable solution for the problem, and are in favor of using this biotic resource to produce high quality food products, and develop alternative forms of tourism. Hunting tourism can play a significant role in dealing with this ecological imbalance, providing business opportunities, contributing to the local and regional development of the island and promoting the further development of the branding of the island as an alternative touristic destination.

Purchases from online stores are preferred by the majority of European customers. Thus, it has stimulated both academic and business interest the identification of the factors that can affect their success. The objective of this article is to increase the understanding of the factors affecting the success of an online store. Thus, it can be a tool for online shop managers to have an overview of the factors that are important for an e-shop success. To achieve this, we contact a systematic literature review which tries to determine the success factors. In order to achieve this, we examine 24 articles published between 2013 and 2017 from peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Then we classify the factors in four main categories design and site presentation, e-marketing techniques, trading, delivery and customer support before and after the purchases and site’s reliability, safety and reputation.

With the evolution of technology, social network sites become a new medium for consumers and marketing professionals. Instagram is one of the fastest growing mediums since it allows marketing practitioners to interact with their audience by capturing and sharing photographs and videos to build a relationship and also has a great potential of online shopping. Instagram offers not only a new medium or e-shopping platform but also offers new ways of celebrity endorsements. Thousands or even millions of people follow not only traditional celebrities like actors, singer, etc. but also accounts of normal everyday people, called as influencers on these social media platforms like Instagram. The purpose of this paper is to examine how brands utilize influencers and celebrities for building and maintaining relationships with various publics on Instagram. This paper presents the results of a content analysis that examined the use of brands by Turkish influencers and celebrities on Instagram. Brands appearing on ten influencers’ and ten celebrities’ Instagram pages, during the first 5 months of 2019, were examined using a criteria set to make comparisons. The results of this research can be used as a starting point by brands targeting Turkish audience for determining marketing strategies on Instagram.

Madhya Pradesh (MP) is a central Indian state positioned as the heart of India. The MP tourism board undertakes the responsibility of developing tourism in the state with the aim of promoting sustainable form of tourism. One of the key attractions promoted is the wide range of wildlife destinations in conservation areas, which has displaced many local indigenous communities. The main aim of paper is to review the relevant policies concerning the wildlife tourism product in MP to examine the involvement of the indigenous local communities and highlight their plight due to displacement. This paper utilizes a critical interpretive lens in reviewing the policies and the concerned acts. Findings highlight three areas of concern; firstly, there is a lack of clear information on how wild life tourism would be developed, implemented and governed. Secondly, the relevant policies do not mention the involvement of the local indigenous community or their issues and finally the policies does not clearly address the displaced indigenous communities’ issues while subsisting to a sustainable tourism vision. Implications for … are discussed.

The impact of social media on the tourism industry has great significance for all stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to highlight and comprehend how social media’s (Social Networking and Review Sites) influences accommodation’s booking intention, with regards to Airbnb accommodation. To achieve the purpose, the paper focuses on exploring the scope of social media, comprehending the different levels of exposure or usage of social media by different generations, and analyzing the influence of social media in booking Airbnb accommodations. Through these objectives, it intends to emphasize the role of social media in the tourism industry, as well as brings out the benefits for tourists across the globe. This research expresses the factors that are considered to influence Airbnb booking intention through a conceptual framework. In analyzing the scope of choosing Airbnb as a traveler’s accommodation, this study also demonstrates that social media is a useful tool in improving not only the quality of business but also increasing the revenue.

While most Blockchain technology seems to be new, applications of this technology, beyond electronic payments, such as supply chains, health care and asset management appear every day. All of them stem from the distinctive advantages of Blockchain technology; volatility, trust, transparency and reliability. Blockchain already affects the banking and accounting sectors, and all its economy-abided activities. Under this context, the purpose of this study is to explore the knowledge and the attitude of Greek accountants towards Blockchain technology and its advantages and disadvantages with regards to the accounting area. For the analysis, a convenient sample of 100 Greek accountants was used. Results reveal that Greek accountants use digital infrastructure and technology, but they report low knowledge on Blockchain technology and lack of trust in using it for their transactions. The questionnaire has been factor analyzed and the following factors emerged: (a) The attitude of the accountants, (b) The need for validated files and reliability of sources, (c) The reliability of Blockchain technology, and (d) The need to eliminate intermediaries. Implications for providing more training through seminars and education for the accounting sector, businesses and employees are discussed.

The present paper reports on the results of a small-scale research which took place in 2018. Fifty-eight (58) Greek academics from the Ionian University (56.7% of the total Faculty members) completed the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI), in which an open-ended question was included, aiming to detect their view on the issue of University Pedagogy and their potential needs for pedagogical training. Their responds showed that the majority of them recognize the need for pedagogical training, while they suggest specific interventions to the direction of the improvement of Faculty’s pedagogical teaching skills. Issues raised from their responds such as the development of Faculty’s communication skills, the psychological support of students, the creation of relationships of trust and respect with them, the creative exploitation of new technologies and the specific teaching and learning needs of the several disciplines are further discussed.

In the competitive leisure marketplace, museums are systematically seeking new ways of engaging and retaining audiences as well as attracting new markets. Over the past decade, late night thematic events, known as ‘Lates’, are becoming an increasing feature of museums, and a key method of attracting underrepresented visitor groups. As the growing body of studies suggest, these events, balancing between entertainment and learning, are addressed to a new target audience segment, the Generation Y. The paper aims to explore this emerging practice in Athens and in particular in the Industrial Gas Museum. Given that the phenomenon has not yet been investigated in the context of the Greek museum landscape, the paper takes as starting point the development of themed night-time events in museums elsewhere, mainly the UK, and reviews their typical features and their evaluation. It then focuses on the novel adoption of late night events by the Industrial Gas Museum entitled ‘Let’s be late!’. Key questions are raised: Are the attendees non-traditional museum visitors and do they respond to the characteristics of Generation Y? How does their feedback relate to the Museum’s intentions? Does the ‘Lates’ event encourage engagement with the permanent collections or intentions for subsequent visits? The study draws on two forms of data collection: observations of use of space, and a research questionnaire. Results illustrated that frequent museum visitors and young audiences who are familiar with the museum respond well to the event. Implications are discussed.

In the Programming Period 2007–2013 cultural heritage has always been defined as an emerging market, however from the total sum of 47 billion euros Structural Funds, only 6 billion (1.7%) are allocated to culture, as culture is thought to be an issue of national interest. Given the fact, that only few fields of application require such a vast integration of different skills, the question is: why culture is considered a trans-European market but remains heavily subsidized at national level. This paper builds an attempt to shed light on how do we measure the return on cultural investment; if it is correct to measure only direct returns; what does it exactly mean to invest in culture rather than investing in construction or in the production of ice cream; if we use should the same criteria or is it necessary to proceed differently. We argue that the understanding that the social value of any investment is far more important than the actual income: the sums for example governments can save health services, if violence is decreased, are substantially higher than the sums invested for culture to regulate social behavior. We further argue that in order to achieve this goal, the cultural sector needs to transcode contemporary impressions into emotion by employing art and artists, while economists need to demonstrate the social balance and the social profit of a market such as culture.

In recent years, Travel & Tourism (T&T) has demonstrated to be important drivers of economic growth. The sector continues to provide specific possibilities for improving and emerging nations to uprise the value chain. T&T Competitiveness Index (TTCI) is an evaluation tool to evaluate the case of how to strengthen the global competitiveness of the T&T sector and ensures a global platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue. TTCI serve to achieve a strong and sustainable T&T sector which effectively contribute to international economic development. TTCI involves a variety of criteria as well as in many decision-making problems. Although the TTCI is not taken into account when calculating, these criteria importance are different from each other and different criteria weights changes the ranking results. By considering this situation, to consider the T&T competitiveness of the countries, a hybrid MCDM method, consists of Rough SWARA and TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multi-criteria decision making), has been developed. By using this hybrid method, policy makers and stakeholders can obtain more prudent and informed decisions than TTCI.

The current research examines the factors that lead to the success of online stores and explores their application to online women’s clothing stores. Initially, by studying the existing literature, factors were gathered and grouped together to develop a research tool. The tool was used in 90 online fashion stores in Greece and internationally, helping to assess and evaluate the success factors in a specific context. The final evaluation has ranked the factors in order of priority and importance and compare stores in national and international context. The findings highlight success factors in real markets and can help both researchers and entrepreneurs themselves to address the phenomenon.

The importance of brand experience in the luxury context has been increasingly gaining attention recently, due to the need to provide consumer with unique moments of connection. This research builds on the growing body of literature, in an attempt to identify the brand attachment’s contribution to that and how self-brand connections can be affecting the process, and also examine the influence of luxury values, national values and human personality on brand attachment. Role theory is used as an underlying theory, specifically analysing consumer’s identity, role formation and role enactment. Using a questionnaire-based survey for existing luxury customers, the findings indicate that brand attachment positively impacts brand experience, through the mediating role of self-brand connections and highlight the positive influence of luxury and national values play, and the negative of human personality. The results demonstrate the importance of brand attachment as a tool to create strong experiences, and indicate managerial implications for consumers’ selves’ connections to luxury brands.

The blockchain technology has already started to dramatically disrupt the tourism industry. It has the potential to create a new landscape in the tourism industry generated by increased disintermediation, to generate new markets from several cross-industry applications, to modify the systems of rating, booking, supply chain, transportation, contracts, and payments as we know them. This paper aims to identify the effects that blockchain technology will have on marketing in the tourism industry. Based on the literature review, on the analysis of the success stories and cases, on the observations on the functional models of the actors that already use the blockchain in the tourism industry, the paper highlights the development prospects in the field and builds the basis for shaping the concept of the future marketing in tourism industry.

Traditionally, but also nowadays, advertising employs gender representations which are widely used and recognized. At the same time, we witness a constantly growing number of advertisements and brands that attempt to challenge the prevailing images and entities of masculinity and femininity. This paper presents the outcome of research regarding perceptions towards gender-neutral advertising and stereotypes. Specifically, it explores gender differences related to gender-neutral advertising and also differences regarding stereotypes amongst members of two different generational cohorts. The targeted population consists of the Greek generation Z and generation Y cohorts. Statistical analysis was employed to examine the hypothesized differences. Discussion based on results and advertising techniques is pointed out for a brand’s communications strategies.

Achievements in construction/fabrication techniques and technology-orientated design production influence hospitality design. New technologies affect the ways tourism information is spread, accessibility of searching, booking and reviewing, as well as spatial design that takes into account new technologies in the ways space is processed, fabricated and used, leading to a reconsideration of the hospitality accommodation. Regional and personal values, together with a significant demand for involvement of the self and a search for identity are attempting to keep balance with globalization. Tourists seek for interactivity and personalization and as a consequence designers respond. New technologies support batch production and variations, and their incorporation in the construction transforms establishments into flexible smart buildings that satisfy the changing social and individual needs. Customizable production technologies promote the extensive use of personal preferences in colour, texture, settings, arrangements and layouts. Digital simulation techniques allow the creation of virtual environments to investigate their application. The aim of this paper is to explore, through student projects, the new trends in construction that gain an increasingly important role in hospitality design. Students interpret the differentiated stimuli they get in the educational process and integrate fore-coming technologies in order to produce speculative and foretelling scenarios.

M-commerce escalates at exponential rates, worldwide. Through a mobile device, i.e., smartphone/iPhone/android/tablet/iPad, we may buy almost everything at any time and any place. Companies may perform 360° marketing, integrating communication messages in a network context, through social media and interactive virtual stores, on a 24/7/360 basis. Network, interactive communication becomes an asset, on this one, providing add-value and new market expansion opportunities for its business users. In this paper we focus on content engagement and interactivity that, according to marketing literature, when involved properly in m-commerce strategies, may provide competitive advantage. To this end, we based upon extensive literature review and, especially, the UTAUT model of new ITs’ adoption. The preliminary research resulted in the formation of a quantitative research instrument, which was disseminated through the LinkedIn, used as the research field. The convenience sample comprised 181 social media and Internet/Mobile marketing managers working at respective Greek companies, that volunteer to participate, yielding 26.3% response. Research hypotheses were tested using SEM analysis. The findings imply that interactivity may have moderating effects in the relationship between content engagement in mobile b-to-b strategy and company performance, in terms of competitiveness, profitability and market expansion. Implications, limitations and future research are also discussed.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that focuses on Greek companies’ social media use, in the context of business-to-business. Specifically, we make a set of hypotheses, regarding that: (1) social media use will be related to enhanced business performance, and, (2) services’ producing companies will use the social media more intensively, than their goods’ producing counterparts. In order to test our hypotheses, we addressed to a randomly selected sample of 800 companies and collected data from 210 volunteer marketing and social media managers (response rate 26.3%), using the LinkedIn as the research field. A series of statistical analyses, using the SPSS 21, provided reliability and validity of our research measures. Our hypotheses were supported by advanced statistics. Correlation analysis provided evidence for our first hypothesis. In turn, cluster analysis depicted two clusters, the ‘SM Innovators’ and the ‘SM Skepticals’, which were significantly related to the services’ and the goods’ producers, respectively. It appears that SM inclusion in b-to-b marketing plans is related to enhanced business performance. Also, SM Innovators reflecting the services companies are more beneficial, than their goods producing counterparts. Implications to academics and practitioners are also discussed.

Robots have an important role on the development of hotel services. Although the use of robots on hotels is still in a primitive level, there is evident that the use of robots can leverage the quality of services. Nonetheless, there is a need to move on with more research and more empirical evidence. For this reason, the author has made a research proposal for a quantitative research. This is going to be addressed with a questionnaire given on both customers and employees/managers of hotels, so to see both views’ on this matter. It would be the first major research in Greece and surely a significant contribution on the existing knowledge.

This paper proposes a tool for teaching advertising through case studies, enhancing critical skills, media and visual literacy. Using a three-letter acronym and relying on Observation, Research and Conclusion, O.R.C. is here applied on a print ad that promotes Greece as a tourism destination. The paper shows how O.R.C. may lead students to understand the underlying advertising strategy. The tool is considered suitable for advertisements of different product categories in different media. It can initially be used in class, with the instructor’s guidance, and later in written assessments, formative and summative, since it allows for the formation of specific grading criteria that are process oriented. The tool may be of use both in marketing and media departments and relies on the premise that stimulus-based research rather than a priori research helps students discover knowledge and develop their critical thinking.

The objective of this brief general market analysis is to determine with the VRIO framework how the “Grupo Posadas” (Posadas Group) has managed to maintain itself in the Mexican lodging market. The aim is to understand the current panorama of tourism and the main challenges of the Grupo Posadas. The main question that fueled this analysis was: Is Grupo Posadas the current leader in the hospitality sector in Mexico? The hypothesis states that the strategies implemented by Grupo Posadas have allowed it to remain in the lodging sector, however its current elements are not strong enough for it to be the market leader. Therefore, combining the analysis elements of the market and the VRIO, results were obtained that indicated that the Grupo Posadas shares the leadership with IHG Hotels, beginning to generate a more marked oligopolistic competition in the field of tourism.

Nowadays, private and public organizations are trying to improve the level of employee satisfaction and perceived value in a more holistic view of marketing practices. Satisfying employee’s needs through an internal marketing orientation, will result in higher levels of customer perceived quality and satisfaction, particularly in service organizations. Although many studies have been made concerning employee job satisfaction in the private industry, empirical research on job satisfaction in nonprofit public sector such as police organizations has been limited. The current study focuses on the importance of the implementation of internal marketing practices in nonprofit public sector organizations, by investigating the case of job satisfaction in 218 police officers at Police Department of Chios. Engaged police officers will have a strong impact on the quality of police services, which in turn will affect public safety and citizen satisfaction, considering the dangers of their profession. Indeed, the results, using multivariate data analysis revealed that police personnel’s satisfaction level was affected by a total of nine factors, namely “relationship with immediate supervisor”, “relationship with co-workers”, “perceptions of pride”, “relationship with senior management”, “financial and non-financial benefits” “working hours”, “employee’s workload”, “promotional process”, and “recognition for achievement”.

The increasing use of social media has led to the expanding adoption of ICT applications in hospitality and tourism. To communicate their image, destinations and service providers undertake various initiatives exerting vast impact on their target audiences. To further stimulate travel, tourism providers foster collaborations with celebrities, the role of which has yet to be examined regarding the way tourism destinations perceptions are formulated. The aim of the study is to test the relationship between celebrity endorsement and destination perceptions. Contributing to the current research stream, the research extends previous findings incorporating celebrity endorser’s characteristics, destination image and intention to visit the destination. A quantitative research was conducted, using a celebrity spot shared on the YouTube channel of Aegean Airlines. Respondents were asked to express their perceptions about Santorini, as promoted by Giannis Antetokounmpo, the reputable basketball player worldwide. Empirical evidence validates previous findings and contributes to the body of knowledge about the role of social media and the influence of celebrities on tourists’ perceptions behavioral intentions. Celebrity endorser’s characteristics were found to positively affect destination familiarity, destination image and visitation intentions. Findings are extracted, and conclusions are provided for both the tourism professionals and the academic community.

Mexico is the sixth country worldwide with more wealth assets with 35 recognized ones as world heritage which wakes up the interest of the world to know the national culture, this serves as motivation for the industry of the tourism marketing and the adoption of the national wealth as a resource for this one. In Mexico the touristic industry has begun to develop this type of marketing, without granting the due importance to the national wealth, besides the fact of which in December, 2018 the government report the disappearance of the Council of Tourist Promotion of Mexico (CPTM), institution that one was entrusting of the diffusion of the country as tourist destination worldwide, the department of marketing of the Council had as mission develop new tourist options in Mexico to increase both national and international demand. For previous, this research investigates in the relation among the national heritage and the tourist marketing and like this one it is possible to transform in a resource for the above-mentioned industry; in order to generate a suitable offer for the utilization of the heritage, the study arises from the question: what requirements do exist in order that the national wealth could turn into a resource for the tourist marketing? Equally there takes form the aim of the present investigation, later, one presents the frame of reference defining to the heritage and their classifications, beside conceptualizing the marketing and the marketing elements. In the paragraph relating to the methodology, it is found that the design of investigation of this work is of Investigation-action, due to the search of the improvement of the processes and actions, as well as the direct involvement of the investigators and the raising of information that was carried out by means of semi-structured interviews. Later to the obtained results, an offer is generated on what shares they must be carried out in order that the national wealth is a resource for tourism marketing.

Strategic management is that set of managerial decisions and actions that determines the continuing and future performance of an organization. Especially, the strategic planning is determining the optimal future for an organization, and the changes required to achieve it. Museums as any other cultural institution generally conduct strategic plans for any or all of the following reasons (performance, funding, accreditation, staff motivation, expansion, etc.). There are some key parts (organization analysis, formulated strategy, developed goals, developed objectives, developed action plans, evaluation) of a strategic plan during a strategic planning process. In this paper, it is presented and analyzed three case studies, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Historical Museum of the University of Athens, as applications of strategic planning and targeting in the specific area of art museums.

The tourist activity is an important source of income for a country; This statement is based on the communication 90 of the Ministry of Tourism published on September 18, 2018, which announces that the entry of foreign currency to Mexico by international visitors showed a growth of 3.3% in the first half of 2018, reaching 13,527 million dollars, compared to 13,096 million registered in the same period of the previous year. Priority needs to be given on human resources and extensive knowledge of the national tourism heritage; it is because the students who study in this branch of knowledge will be those who in the future will be dedicated to this activity, contributing their skills and experiences in the field of work, since they will have the necessary skills to strengthen this sector of tourism services and generate more resources to the country. In this sense, in Mexico there are public and private institutions that train their students in the tourism sector; the National Polytechnic Institute is a public school that offers a degree in Tourism at the Higher School of Tourism (HST), which provides education to train promoters of tourism resources that the nation has. Thus, this work presents if the graduates are properly trained in knowledge about the national heritage, determining the relevance of the academic program, which will allow a successful insertion in the labor field to have the skills required by the Employers. Therefore, it was decided to carry out a cross-sectional investigation, applying the instruments only once in time; Likewise, it is descriptive with a mixed research approach that included surveys of a sample of the main employers, which allowed the quantitative and qualitative analysis through interviews.

The purpose of this paper is to bring to the surface of the scientific discussion a significant part of Greece’s cultural heritage: the cultural heritage associated with the sea surroundings of the country, so that it can become a distinct axis of planning special, qualitatively upgraded and innovative cultural routes and itineraries both on land, as well as at sea, interconnecting the islands with each other, and the islands with the rest of the country, which is anyway a large peninsula surrounded by sea. Wealth related to the sea has often inspired Hollywood—recently was “Aquaman”, Marvel’s big production by DC Comics and Warner’s Bros. With a methodology based on a collection of empirical and secondary data, the content of the “naval heritage” and/or “sea culture” is described and an attempt is made to outline cultural routes and itineraries, using the island of Chios as an example.

Cocoa is one of the most traded goods around the world. México produced the first cocoa beans for more than two thousand years ago and it is one of the biggest cocoa beans producer and exporter in the world. This paper addresses the context of Mexican cocoa in international trade; which aims to identify the determinants of cocoa exports during 1996–2016 and evaluate how they influenced through the development of an econometric model to which various tests were applied in order to obtain the correlation coefficient between the variables and the significance of the model. This research contemplates the variables: production, production costs and international price, where production and production cost had a positive impact while international price had a negative impact. This paper also arises a brief explanation of why they may have influenced and how this impact can be handled in the future.

The study examines and compares the Entrepreneurship and Start-Ups ecosystems of MIT and Greece. Despite the major differences in size and maturity, the studies identify key difference between MIT and Ecosystems, especially in terms of a deeper understanding of entrepreneurial education and its value in identifying and successfully pursue business opportunities. Other key differences between MIT and Greek Start Up Ecosystem approach include early finance opportunities, the number of founders and serial entrepreneurship; start-uppers who continue in establishing new ventures, fully exploiting their network, knowledge and experiences. These differences can have significant impact in the future survival and success of the start-up companies. Furthermore, the basic economic foundations are also very different: MIT excels in Entrepreneurship educations and is one of the most effective ecosystems for innovation and start-up companies worldwide. Greece, on the other hand is an economy and society struggling to survive from a decade of economic decline. The Greek start up ecosystem evolved during the last 10 years, however both the economy as a whole and Start-Up ecosystem, as well as start-up companies have a lot to learn from a comparison with MIT Innovation and Start-Ups ecosystems.

This paper presents the advance of an in-progress research which is in the first phase of field research. It addresses the problem of the lack of increase in foreign tourism in the state of Michoacán. For decades, tourism in the world has experienced a continuous growth and a deep diversification, until becoming one of the economic sectors that grow fastest in the world. However, tourism in Mexico has been below the global growth in the economy, and one of the territories of the México that show this stagnation in its growth is Michoacán. It has been studied that the factors such as the lack of investment in tourism infrastructure, the shallow diversification of the tourist offer and the low tourist competitiveness have stopped the growth of foreigners tourist influx. This advance consists of the fundamentals of research where the problem was detected, the theoretical framework, and the first phase of the field research.

Robotics has many different applications in production—for example automation of production lines—and in services. A particular point of view is whether robots can replace people in the provision of services, in the case of tourism services. At present, the application of robotics to tourism is very limited, while at the academic level there has begun to have a relative interest. The current chapter has made an attempt to analyse the current research on the relationship between the use of robotics and service quality on hotels. The outcome is that there is a limited research which indicates that there is a positive relationship, though there are some reservations such as that the customers need to interact with humans. For this reason, the chapter makes a recommendation for future research.

The winery in Greece has an ascendant course and the development and modernization of the wine-growing units and vineyards helps to attract wine tourists who want to taste and wander in the vineyards and in the Greek nature. The promotion and development of wine tourism and the wider acquaintance of tourists and consumers with traditional Greek and not only wines, contribute to the recognition of Greek wines and Greece as a destination. Our aim should be to meet the different needs and wishes of the broader market to attract tourists and visitors all year round with varied and alternative activities in a dynamically changing environment. Functional axis of prospects, for Central Macedonia, is the offer of upgraded quality of aesthetics and recreation services, as well as similar unique wine tourism experiences. The chapter has examined the case of wine tourism in Central Macedonia and it concludes there is a need to strengthen its presence with the development of new wine roads.

This chapter assesses the competitiveness of the Greek coastal destinations, in a comparative context. To do so, it develops various indicators which help destinations to conceptualize both their dynamics and their structural advantages. To better depict the competitiveness of destinations, the indicators are formulated by using the user-generated data being available at the TripAdvisor website. Under this data-mining process, the benchmarking can highlight critical features of the tourism industry, which cannot be revealed when analysis is based on the typical official data. The results signify a gap of competitiveness between the insular and non-insular destinations but also they reveal some critical features of the tourism-supply, which can facilitate the sustainable development of all Greek destinations.

The hotel market operates in a particular competitive environment. In this context it is necessary for the tourism enterprises through the Human Resources Department to identify and use the appropriate staff to achieve their goals. The Human Resources management of the hotels has as its main functions the staffing, education, evaluation, motivation, as well as the remuneration policies of the company’s personnel. Businesses confirm the conclusion that the human factor plays a leading role in achieving their goals, but this requires human resources management to use the right people in the right place. In this context, the effectiveness of the Human Resources Department helps to satisfy the employees, which is of major importance as it ultimately affects customer satisfaction. In this literature review, the authors have made a number of suggestions on how the HRM can intervene so to improve the internal marketing operations by investing into the human capital of the Greek hotels. Of course, there is plenty of space for future research on this field.

The aim of this research is to explore whether there is a discernible impact of significant ecotourism experience on the extent to which travellers are willing to voluntarily carbon-offset (VCO). Placed in the context of VCO schemes for long-haul air travel (between Australia and Europe), a choice experiment has been designed with key attributes such as quantity and cost of the offset, the type of offset program and whether or not the program is certified. Two studies have been conducted involving 50 and 48 individuals, respectively. Findings suggest that attributes such as total cost of VCO, offset program certification and project type influence young travellers’ VCO choice behaviour. The preliminary results show evidence not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the variation in the relative importance of these attributes is associated with the respondent’s participation in significant ecotourism. In most cases, travellers were not willing to forego the option of not travelling, despite acknowledging the contribution the flight has on emissions. Results raise a case for the development of strategic marketing for VCO in aviation especially on routes to/from ecotourism destinations.

This chapter explores existing practices regarding the Hellenic Embassies’ use of Twitter, paving the way toward their optimization. Twitter diplomacy offers significant advantages yet use in the Greek public sector appears to be sparse and anemic, depriving opportunities that would benefit the country. The authors studied a sample of five Twitter accounts in five different countries for 7 days, conducting quantitative and thematic analysis. Thus, they collected evidence on the frequency and periodical nature of the tweets; on the interactivity between the users and the account owners; on the existence of content strategy and content pillars; on the selected language; and, finally, on the extroversion of these accounts and the overall assessment of the communication strategy followed. The Greek Communication Officers appear to be using Twitter hesitantly, responding to occurrences rather than building opportunities, divided between the imperative for a tightly controlled central communication policy and the need for agile, real time, localized, interactive approaches with specific target groups in each country. Significant variations emerge from one Twitter account to another, thus indicating a lack of diffusion in terms of know-how and a lack of adequate alignment between the Greek central administration and the Communication Officers in Greek embassies.

The scope of this chapter is to examine the case of knowledge management on the hotel business. The search for quality is directly related to the conversion of personal knowledge into a collective asset. In order to explore the processes leading to effective knowledge management, concepts such as this one are studied learning organizations, practice communities, in-house training, and it clarifies that a “thinking workforce” integrates learning into work processes by utilizing it to continually improve its services. In particular, reference was made to ways in which employees can integrate knowledge and channel it into the organization through Knowledge Management. Having in mind the important role of knowledge management on hotels, the chapter has focused on how to empower those intellectual skills so to leverage the performance of hotels.

This chapter aims to extract information about the complaints management strategies of the Greek hotels and to measure their interaction with the TripAdvisor users. The research builds on the comments and complaints being available at this website and performs a statistical analysis to detect differences between different hotel-classes (1-star up to 5-star). The results show a limited overall existence of responses, which is unevenly distributed over the high-class and against the lower-class hotels, illustrating a conventional pattern of complaints management “quality” in the tourism sector in Greece. Overall, this chapter highlights the importance of the information being available in travel and tourism social-media websites and it motivates for further research and the hotel companies to get involved with such applications.

Over the last four decades, the practice of temporary exhibitions has been growing rapidly. However, the effort and expense involved have led to a debate about their future and a critical view of their contribution to the museum’s sustainability. With this background, understanding the market for temporary exhibitions and audiences’ attitudes towards them is fundamental to strategic and effective planning. Though museums have substantially developed the field of audience research, there is no systematic knowledge of visitors’ perspectives and behaviour when it comes to temporary exhibitions. This paper seeks to address this lack of knowledge by studying the latest temporary archaeological exhibition of an established museum, known for its engaging shows. In order to arrive at a better understanding of visitors’ approach, it looks, through a research questionnaire, at the relation of temporary exhibitions’ audiences to the regular visitors, what visitors consider as the distinctive features of the Museum’s shows, and how they explore the exhibition. The research findings are analyzed as insights in themselves, and interpreted in the context of existing knowledge. A deeper understanding of how exhibitions work for audiences can lead, it is argued, to more informed choices both from a curatorial and a marketing point of view.

This chapter aims to address the duty of maintaining and honoring our natural and cultural inheritance in the field of tourism. On this attempt we have created a project to represent this idea of ameliorating cultural and touristic services. It is about the alternation of an old traditional private residence in Paros island into agrotouristic guest houses with ecologically friendly solutions. Agrotourism is an original type of tourism where costumers are not only offered accommodation but instead they are given the chance to get involved with close to nature and culture activities. This project stands as a fine example of how tourism instead of aiming in low quality and short term profit could be inviting costumers to get closer to nature and tradition and support cultural education and local economy.

Every artistic creation is a product of the main aesthetics principles of its time and represents the social and political culture of a certain era. The GNTO, ever since it became the national body for the promotion of tourism in Greece, has launched numerous campaigns, slogans and posters in an attempt to attract more tourists to the country. A beautiful image is the first read of all posters aiming at attracting visitors, but there is significant information to be discovered in a more detailed analysis of the visual product presented. The main developmental goals for tourism are included in the picture and the subtle changes in the way central government views tourism can also be traced in the fine lines. Accordingly, information relating to social structure, the place of women in the society, religion, politics, the role of the environment, cultural heritage and finally technology can also be identified according to the time period of a certain artistic creation and in this situation the GNTO posters. For the purpose of this analysis a set of indicators relating to advancements in technology, main political scene, environmental and cultural sensitivity and more, has been created in an attempt to analyze the main developmental goals for tourism in Greece as they come across by examining the relevant GNTO posters. The overall aim is to identify the role of an image not merely for its aesthetics, but as a cultural product that can promote a very complex message supporting the overall development of tourism and can act as a development tool.

Previous work at the Merchant Marine Academy of Macedonia was carried out regarding the engine cadets that have fulfilled the first on board training voyage. The same survey took place regarding the engine cadets that have fulfilled also the second on board training voyage. In the present paper a merging of the two different surveys is conducted in order to draw a conclusion concerning all the cadets. In the present study an investigation takes place on how Cadets can benefit using Social Media on board during the training voyage and implications are presented.

This study identifies and analyzes the impact of seasonality on the management of tourist accommodations in the Azores. We selected a set of accommodation types under various categories to determine the similarities and differences in the impact of seasonality on their management. Using a qualitative method, we conducted interviews with the managers to draw conclusions. The results point to the existence of significant seasonality, with a high concentration of sales in the summer. They also highlight the need to stimulate low season demand by searching for new segments of tourists who could be encouraged to travel to the region and improve intermediate season demand by increasing marketing activities.

The patient-physician therapeutic relationship begins before the two parties’ verbal communication. For example, the patient may form an attitude from the non-verbal communication cues, such as the practice’s physical environment, the processes and the administration staff. Colors, paintings and works of art, lighting, certificates, are features that may affect the patient during his waiting time and, probably, his relationship with the physician. This research wanted to examine patients’ therapeutic experience, and, specifically, their perceptions on the ambient environment of physicians’ waiting areas and practices and their relationship with trust and proximity to the physician. To this end, we conducted a quantitative research with 95 respondents of the psychiatric health sector. Data were analyzed through advanced statistics, using the SPSS 23 statistical package. Our findings imply that there is a relationship between the physician practice’s interior decoration and the patients’ trust and proximity. Specifically, cluster analysis grouped data in three clusters that we called as ‘Leeries’, ‘Aloofs’ and ‘Intimates’, showing variability on the variables patient’s trust and proximity to physician as well as, on variables pertaining to practice’ ambient environment. The paper discusses the findings and implications as well as the limitations and propositions for future research.

The purpose of the present study was to reveal, when employees enjoy well-being at their workplace their will have higher knowledge creation outcomes. The study took place at the individual level. The sample of the study consisted of 185 employees from 31 units of 12 different hotels in Greece. A valid scale measuring workplace well-being was used along with a scale that was developed for this study in order to measure knowledge creation outcomes. Results indicate that employees who enjoy workplace well-being they will actually develop higher knowledge creation outcomes, with p = 0.001. This should be considered by hotel managers, when designing and implementing human resources practices as those who will boost workplace well-being will result to greater knowledge creation outcomes. Future research could be conducted by adding more variables to the equation the various aspects of well-being in order to see how health, social and happiness well-being of the employees affect the knowledge creation outcomes of the employees.

International trends and growing demands in the field of cultural tourism gave birth to Cultural Routes in recent years. It is a program of the Council of Europe. In our study we will examine the influence of this program on the management of the material and intangible heritage of mankind. Our study emphasizes the benefits that can be gained for Greece. Given the economic crisis and the resulting social crisis that has plagued Greece in recent years, it is imperative that the adoption of new cultural models that will strengthen the economy at local, regional and national levels will create incentives for entrepreneurship and the preservation of cultural heritage. Regarding the current situation in Greece, the paper unveils that there are some fine examples which can be used as role models for the future development of new cultural routes. However, there is a need to create the necessary policies and initiatives from the side of the Greek state.

This study investigated in depth the growth of interest in branding a destination through gastronomy, and more specifically the interaction among culture, tourism, and food industry. Food appears as a part of the destination marketing mix, as it helps providing a full experience of one destination; it literally allows tourists taste the destination through the local food culture. Food appears as an essential element of every travel experience. It is the “what we eat, how we eat it, and why we eat it” scheme that contributes in travelers’ pleasure while visiting new places. In recent years, gastronomy has become one of the main sources of attraction in the tourist destinations. That is the reason why new and older fine dining restaurants, Michelin starred ones as well, have developed a certain approach towards tourists, especially in Northern and Western Europe. Restaurants provide fine dining experience, sometimes in more casual locations, as part of local culture and tourist attraction creating a destination positioning in market of tourism.

The literature findings on the predictive power of the Big Five personality model on career choice students make is scant. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between personality type and career selection. A 56-item questionnaire was used to measure personality traits and demographics, including three questions regarding preferences to work in the public sector, in the private sector and as a self-employed person. Approximately half the population of the Business Department students answered the questionnaire (N = 417), using Google docs in class. The results indicated that of the five traits only Neurotism and Agreeableness related to career choice. Although further studies need to be conducted to examine the aforesaid variable relationships, based on the findings reported here, career advisors and school counselors could be of greater benefit to students if they focused more on those possessing the two traits to an above average extent.

As tourism services markets expand and become more and more complex and uncertain, there is growing recognition that competitive advantage of marketing channels rely not only on superior channel commitment and performance, but also on instant accessibility through mobile devices and user-friendly applications that cancel anachronistic terms such as limitations of place and time. The rapid developments of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) on Tourism Distribution Channels have a great impact on worldwide tourism and hospitality industry with significant effect on the dealings between the members of the channels. Vital factors such as power, roles and influences change unpredictable causing confusion to several of the tourism stakeholders. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the case of increasing dominance of the Online Tour Operators on traditional tourism producers (hospitality industry) by comparing their share prices’ returns. In order to achieve this aim, we employ the Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) model to examine dynamic correlations between the major Online Tour Operators’ and big capitalization Hotel Groups’ returns. The primary purpose of this article is to expand the understanding of industry practitioners as well as to academic researchers interested in tourism distributions marketing channels.