Efstathios Velissariou

Integrating Total Quality Management Philosophy in the Greek Tourism Sector

Tourism sector is currently facing challenges due to the fast paced environment, the changes that it needs to keep up with and the financial crisis as well. Within a highly demanding framework the needs for high standards and total quality management arises. Organizations that are related to tourism need to introduce a philosophy of sustainability by developing innovative practices that will enable them to reserve their competitive advantage. Therefore, total quality management can be a useful tool in improving their products and services by focusing in quality parameters.

The Role of Organizational Culture in the Greek Higher Tourism Quality

Organizational culture is considered to be important, if not essential, in all industries and businesses nowadays. Every company has its own unique personality, just like people do. This unique personality of an organization refers to its culture. In order to become more effective, organizations have realized how important is the role of their culture and the critical effects it has especially within the tourism industry. The quality of the services and products is affected to a high extent.

Ethical Tourism: The Theory Vs. The Hedonistic Reality in Popular Greek Tourism Resorts

Tourism has many uses and benefits for local societies, but in many cases a number of negative impacts too. The most important is the environmental impact that mass tourism may create. The tourists sometimes do not respect the cultural and the environmental profile of the country, creating a lot of problems. This is more frequent amongst young people that have not received sufficient education to recognise the importance of culture and traditions outside their own countries. Another serious problem that may arise is that only few people may benefit from tourism and money leaks outside the local community. Besides this, there is also a dark side of the lucrative business of mass tourism: violence by, and between, tourists and sex crimes such as rape. This is mainly attributed to large numbers of young tourists aiming at the consumption of large amounts of cheap alcohol. Drunken male tourists may end up fighting with each other or even harassing female tourists, or even raping them. The aim of this paper is to fill in this gap in the literature regarding this type of tourist behaviour in the Greek resorts: Faliraki and Kavos, by emphasizing actions taken as to prevent these kind of incidents and by focusing on the ethical issues surrounding them. This is a literature review which aims on initiating a discussion, which will lead the way for future research in the area.

Reputation Management in the Tourism Industry

This article will discuss reputational risk, its implications for companies involved in the tourism industry, and how companies’ supervisors assess the management’s ability to measure and monitor this risk. Reputational risk is defined as the potential impacts of negative publicity related to an institution’s/company’s/country’s business practices, regardless true or not; those impacts can range from a decline in the customer base or revenue reductions to costly litigations. Also, destination reputation is the public’s general feeling, impression and cognition of it. A good reputation is an intangible asset for tourism destinations and a vital aspect of sustainable development. Reserving a good reputation revolves around effectively communicating and building solid relationships. Reputational risk is managed through strong corporate governance. How should reputational risk be managed internally in tourism industry companies? The following are just a few examples of key elements for managing reputational risk: Maintaining timely and efficient communications amongst government, customers, boards of directors of companies in tourism industry, and employees Establishing strong enterprise risk management policies and procedures throughout the organization, including an effective anti-fraud program Reinforcing a risk management culture by creating awareness at all staff levels Instilling ethics throughout the organisation by enforcing a code of conduct for the board, management, and staff Developing a comprehensive system of internal controls and practices, including those related to computer systems and transactional websites Complying with current laws and regulations and enforcing existing policies and procedures Implementing independent testing and transactional testing on a regular basis Establishing a crisis management team in the event there is a significant action that may trigger a negative impact on the organization and the touristic destination as a whole. Although building a destination’s reputation may take years, it can certainly be damaged or even destroyed very quickly. Reputational risk depends on a combination of factors daily facing the tourism industry. Governments, local authorities and senior management are responsible for measuring and monitoring reputational risk and therefore must remain vigilant and active in providing the safeguards to prevent loss of reputation.

Exploring Insurance Fraud and Tourists’ Misbehaviour

Fraud affects every type of insurance, whether it is life or non-life insurance. According to Insurance Europe publications, insurance fraud includes providing untruthful or incomplete information in applications for insurance compensation, submitting a claim for a loss based on misleading or untruthful circumstances, including exaggerating a genuine claim; and otherwise being misleading or untruthful in dealings with an insurer, with the intention of gaining a benefit under the insurance contract. Insurance fraud may be committed by the policyholder or by a third party claiming against an insurance policy. It can range from opportunistic claims, through claims for phantom passengers and fictitious injuries in road accidents, to highly organized crime rings. Fraudulent claims and the cost of investigating suspected frauds lead to higher premiums for honest customers. Investigating fraud also has an impact on insurers’ ability to deal with genuine claims quickly. Some resorts in Greece, such as Faliraki and Kavos, have developed a reputation as been places where tourists, mostly British, are often raped from drunken tourists or even from locals. Someone could claim that those are destinations where alcohol and violence can have very negative effects. However, there is also the case of insurance fraud. This research is going to take a deep look not only on the existing theory on insurance fraud, but also on cases which have been on media. Indeed, there is a series of cases where tourists have made claims for been rapped? However, the investigation made from the insurance firms has concluded that no rape has occurred; in most cases the tourists just aimed at the refund given from the insurance company for the case of a rape. Our literature review and secondary research, suggests that there are indeed many cases of this kind of fraud. However, during the past years the insurance firms are on alert and able to reveal many cases of insurance fraud; which has in turn also reduced the cases of persons asking claims from the insurance firms for rapes. Actually, the dramatic fall on the claims from tourists, who claim that they have been raped, is an indication that the increased level of inspections made from the insurance companies have been effective against fraudulent insurance claims.

The Unethical Practice of Hotel Review Ghost-Writers

Business ethics is a field of applied ethics that examines ethical issues that arise in a business environment. Business ethics includes five kinds of activities. The most dominant activity is the analysis of immorality incidents in business. The second type entails the empirical study of business practices while the third type consists of clarifying basic terms and revealing ethical business issues. The forth kind of activity concerns meta-ethical questions and a review of ethics theory. Finally, the fifth kind aims at the resolution of embedded problems. Ethics is a key issue for many industries, including the tourist industry. One of the key issues that has emerged during the past years, is ghost-writing in the tourism sector. Ghost-writer are those who are hired to author books, manuscripts, screenplays, speeches, articles, blog posts, stories, reports, whitepapers, or other texts, officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, participants in news stories, and political leaders, often hire ghost-writers to draft or edit autobiographies, memoirs, magazine articles, or other written material. In music, ghost-writers are often employed to write songs, lyrics and instrumental pieces. Screenplay authors can also use ghost-writers to either edit or rewrite their scripts and improve them. In tourism, ghost-writers employed by hotels for two reasons. The first one is to write a positive review for the hotel and post it on social media, mostly on tripadvisor and similar platform. The second, and arguably worse, case is to write a negative review for a competitor. Both cases are considered unethical, though the latter constitutes a very harmful misconduct. The emergence of ghost-writers has alarmed not only the sector but also social media platform providers. For this reason, some measures have been taken. For example, booking.com requires that reviewers have actually booked a room and that the booking process done through their website. There are having been many cases of ghost-writing, which have undermined the value of TripAdvisor and of other web sites. In some cases, the website has been forced to publicly apologise to their customer or the businesses affected from this kind of malpractice. Overall, this is practice which has not been extensively researched and merits further research.

Greece as a Sports Tourism Destination

The award of the organization of the Olympic Games 2004 in the city of Athens was considered by many to be a great opportunity to address the far as possible many of the wrongs in tourism starting from Athens, tourism, which had irreparably damaged for many years. The tourist image of the wider Athens area, which, as is known, shouldered the brunt of the host and hospitality of both athletes and gymnasts, who were part in the Olympic Games in 2004, and those came to Athens to watch them, did not differ far from that of mainland Greece. Athens, as it was known, has always been an attraction for various types of tourists, the multitude of tourist and the cultural of lures. Nevertheless, however, was not before the Olympics able to offer high quality level of hospitality services to visitors and especially those who for whatever reasons they want to remain in Athens for periods in excess of normal. From Igoumenakis (Tourism. Interbooks, Athens, 2005) we understand that the Olympic games of Athens 2004 leverages the city branding, thus incorporating more tourists, but at the same time the city authorities must try hard in order to attract not only the interest of athletes but to capitalize the benefits of the game in order to attract the interest of tourists and to maintain the positive brand image created from the Olympic games. Wurzburger (Creative tourism: A global conversation: How to provide unique creative experiences for travelers worldwide, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, 2009) argues that the notion of tourism has changed during the past years. While during the past decades tourism has relied in the concept of mass tourism, where cities developed massive concrete facilities without taking into consideration neither the quality of living for their citizens nor the service quality provided to tourists. Under mass tourist large areas in Greece, Spain and elsewhere were transformed from tranquil communities into overcrowded areas where the environment was damaged while on many cases mass tourism was accompanied with negative effects on social values and on some cases it even led on increase on crime rates. Nevertheless, mass tourism had one advantage that few could challenge it; it created jobs and brought welfare for rural and island areas which often were characterized from underdevelopment and poverty (Cooper in Worldwide destinations: The geography of travel and tourism, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Italy, 2005). Wurzburger (Creative tourism: A global conversation: How to provide unique creative experiences for travelers worldwide, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, 2009) notes that this has changed during the past ten years; the need to create sustainable destinations but also competition from new markets that focus on particular market segments has changed the notion of tourist industry. The aim of the project is to examine the potentials of sport tourism in Greece. Almost 15 years after the Olympic games of Athens, Greece has lost a good chance to develop as a sports tourism destination. Through this literature review that will be made, it would be that Greece has several potentials however, till now it has not been able to capitalize the existing opportunities. Therefore, there is a need to work more on this.

Tourism Consumer Behavior and Alternative Tourism: The Case of Agrotourism in Greece

The alternative tourism has a lot of segments according to the specific requirements of the customers, always in order to provide a designed customized leisure. (Ros Derrett, Cultural tourism, Paper presented to Momento, Queensland Merchandise Awards, Brisbane, Qld., 24 July, 2002) More and more travelers are being attracted by these types of tourism, and consequently this creates the development of new potential types of tourists. During the past years there has been a shift from mass tourism into special interest tourism. The reason behind this shift is related with changes on customers’ patterns. According to (Alebaki and Iakovidou in Enometrica 3:15–24, 2010; Iakovidou, Vlahou and Partalidou, 2001. Quality directions in rural tourism in Greece, Proceedings of the International Conference on “New Directions In Managing Rural Tourism And Leisure”, Euro Scotland, 5–8/9/2001) tourists seek to focus on turning away from mass tourism since they feel that this mode of tourism does not satisfy their needs for quality driven tourist activities. (Alebaki and Iakovidou in Enometrica 3:15–24, 2010) have also identified other factors which have to do with local communities. On many cases, (Alebaki and Iakovidou in Enometrica 3:15–24, 2010) have examined the case of agro-tourism in Greece where communities need to develop their economies in a way where tourism will not disrupt their natural resources. On many cases tourism has been accused of damaging the natural environment and social cohesion. For example, a visitor can go to an agrotourist unit which produced organic food. He will stay in the hotel found within the premises of the farm while he will have the chance to eat dinners made from organic products. He can also go for hiking, mountain biking, rafting or any other activity near the unit. This means that the consumers who are choosing this type of tourism have their own distinctive behavior. The aim of this paper is to examine this difference. According to (Tsartas, Sustainable tourism, Kritiki, Athens, 2010) this is a special interest group which was developed during last years. It is made from middle age and high or medium income consumers. For many years those consumers constituted the core of mass tourism but now they feel that tourism on overcrowded destinations does not satisfy them anymore. They seek for more quality driven solutions such as spa tourism, sea tourism, etc. On the other hand they will like to visit a sustainable destination, such as an agrotourist unit but they seek to spend their days in a quality driven agrotourist unit and not the average one. They can afford to pay a considerable amount of money for their holidays and if they are satisfy they will not hesitate to suggest the destination on their friends. It is a growing segment and on many countries it has become they segment of special interest tourism. Their key motive is that they can find in those destinations the tranquility and quality that they are looking for. The expected outcome is that consumers who select agrotourist activities also tend to have their own distinctive characteristics, which is vital for the development of Tourism in Greece to examine them.

The Importance of Customer Relationship Management and Social Media in the Greek Wine Tourism Industry

During the last decades the wine industry in Greece has moved on to significant modernization. Thus, the wine produces have focused into the wine-tourism which seems to be a lucrative sector for wine producers. However, there is a necessity to construct a strong back-end which will be ready to serve the customers. For this reason the paper will examine the value of CRM and of social media on the wine tourism in Greece. The paper is a genuine one, since there has not been any similar research on this field. In addition to this, it is paper which will provide a sound knowledge on PR actioners over how to utilize them. The outcome of this literature review, indicates that CRM surely would benefit those firms, however it seems that the way that the operate—relying on traditional marketing methods, hence the use of social media may not be the ideal though word of mouth is important on this sector. Surely, this leaves a space for future research. This can be qualitative research where the wine makers will express their views and perceptions over the use of CRM and social media on their industry.