The case of the Athens Tourism Partnership

The essence of the partnership

Since 2008, Greece has been struggling to recover from the severest economic recession of the last 50 years, the country’s gross public debt as a percentage of GDP rising from 109.4 per cent in 2008 to 183.5 per cent in 2016 and 181.8 per cent in 2017 (International Monetary Fund, 2018). The financial downturn was followed by high levels of uncertainty with direct negative effects on the domestic tourism flows which decreased by 22.6 per cent between 2008 and 2013 (Research Institute for Tourism, 2014). This observation is in line with the country’s internal conditions in that Greek GDP per capita decreased from 21,844 euros in 2008 to 16,736 euros in 2017 (Hellenic Statistical Authority, 2018a) and the unemployment rate rose from 8.6 per cent in 2008 to 27.5 per cent in August 2013 to subsequently decline to 18.9 per cent by August 2018

Assessing online marketing campaigns 235 (Hellenic Statistical Authority, 2018b). The deterioration of domestic tourism led to the prioritisation of inbound tourism, which depends largely (i.e. about 75 per cent) on air transport (Papatheodorou and Arvanitis, 2014). According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC, 2018), tourism revenues account for 19.7 per cent of GDP and 24.8 per cent of total employment in Greece. Inbound tourists totalled about 27.1 million, accounting for 14.6 billion euros in 2017 (UNWTO, 2018). In the region of Attica, where Athens is located, employment in the tourism sector constitutes 6.7 per cent of total employment, up from 5.4 per cent in 2010 (INSETE, 2018). International arrivals at hotels rose from 1,946,902 in 2010 to 2,906,545 in 2017, and hotels’ occupancy rate increased from 39.8 per cent in 2010 to 50.5 per cent in 2017 (INSETE, 2018). Athens International Airport is the only A-class airport (> ten million passengers) in Greece, reporting 21,669,421 passengers in 2017 and accounting for 37.45 per cent of total traffic in the country (Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority, 2018), and it has a relatively high Airport Dependency Index (ADI) score in comparison with the other 42 European airports in its category (Koo et al., 2016). The seasonal nature of inbound tourism in Athens directly affects the airport’s traffic and affects airlines, destination authorities and other stakeholders’ revenues.

Athens Tourism Partnership (ATP) consists of Athens International Airport, Aegean Airlines and Athens Development and Destination Management Agency and is a long-term marketing agreement launched in December 2016 to enhance Athens’s brand awareness and to promote Athens as a city-break destination under the guidance of Bloomberg Associates (Athens Partnership, 2018). Athens International Airport S.A. is public-private partnership established in 1996 to manage Athens International Airport (which started operations in 2001) on the basis of a 30-year concession agreement (Athens International Airport, 2018). Aegean Airlines is the largest Greek airline operating in 155 destinations, 33 domestic and 122 international ones (Aegean Airlines, 2018). In 2013, Aegean Airlines, which is a privately owned airline and a member of Star Alliance, acquired Olympic Airlines, the former flag carrier. Athens Development and Destination Management Agency (ADDMA) is overseen by the Municipality of Athens and aims to promote the city as an attractive year-round destination for business and leisure travellers (ADDMA, 2018).