Yiannis Evangelou

President,
Hellenic Association of Travel & Tourism Agents

Philoxenia 2003 greeting.

We live in a world where everything quickly changes on the world tourism stage with new tourism products, new consumer trends and increased international competition. Recent problems confronted by the tourism industry forced all, but particularly airlines and travel agents, to adapt to new realities. Greece must also adapt to these new realities and re-evaluate its tourism aims.

Today’s strongest international trend centers on cooperation to achieve a common goal. To keep in step, we at HATTA work in this direction both at home and abroad. On an international scale, we created a cooperation with travel and tour agents within the Balkan countries so as to create common tourism activities that would lead to common tourism promotion activities. In markets such as the USA and China we could attain positive results for all through a common advertising and promotion effort.

On the domestic front, our cooperation with all tourism sectors resulted in the creation of an Athens Convention and Visitors’ Bureau. Conference tourism, apart from the high quality standards required in services and infrastructure, demands a coordinated advertising and promotion effort on the destination level. Here, the state can and must cooperate with sectors and businesses that are directly or indirectly involved tourism and derive the benefits.

We realize that cooperation demands effort and that there are problems to overcome. However, on the basis of prevailing conditions this is the only road we can walk expending our best efforts.