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This paper explores and evaluates the structure of the cognitive component of tourism destination image. The empirical study is operationalized in a sun-and-sand tourism destination of a Greek region. Given the reported multidimensionality of the construct, and the critic on the psychometric properties of previously defined scales measuring tourism destination image, this study examines the applicability of a new scale and provides empirical evidence to propose an alternative component structure for the formation of cognitive tourism destination image. Our analysis suggests four image dimensions: (1) must-be conditions (2) attractive conditions, (3) appealing activities, and (4) natural environment. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greek museums, in the new era of economic recession, face the agony of surviving and at the same time chase the challenges for sustainable development. The scope of this survey is to define the groups of tourists who visited Greek public museums and their evaluations of the museums' services. The cluster analysis, forms different groups of tourists, and the principal component analysis reveals the factors that represent museum's quality characteristics. The analysis of variance follows, to correlate the already defined clusters per factors and to answer the research questions. The quantitative research reveals that, there are three different groups of tourists, and confirms that visitors behave according to the group they belong. Therefore, in formulating a strategy to attract and satisfy the cultural tourists, the improvement in the provision of educational services and the better training of the personnel are needed, since most problems are noticed on these aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empirical work reported here was aimed at investigating Crete's fundamental attraction elements; six factors related to Crete's image were identified and examined in terms of their significance in predicting and explaining its overall image. While analysing the factors, 'seaside activities' was determined to be the most significant factor in identifying Crete's overall destination image. Through relevant factor analysis and subsequent multiple regression analysis, it was established that highly rated destination image dimensions may be among the most important ones influencing the destination's overall tourism image. Management implications are discussed and recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on philhellenic travellers' perceptions and experiences of Greece in the early nineteenth century, especially during the War of Independence in the 1820s. The central argument is that philhellenes – that is to say, supporters of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire – understand Greece as a ‘real-and-imagined’ space. Greece is an ‘imagined’ location in the sense that philhellenic conception of it is shaped by certain rhetorical assumptions and priorities. But, evidently, it is also a ‘real’ space, not simply in the obvious sense that the landscape has a tangible existence, but also in that those rhetorical constructions have concrete consequences and expressions. These expressions are especially significant because philhellenic travellers conceive the region as both a literal and conceptual borderland on the edges of Europe. They consider Greece fundamental to European history, culture and self-definition, but because it is ruled by the Ottoman Empire, it is also an unfamiliar space at the margins of Europe. In other words, Greece is both within and outside European space, and its liminal position represents wider uncertainties about the conception of Europe in the early nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to: study the relative efficiency between hotels operating under a brand and hotels operating independently, on the island of Crete, Greece; identify the inefficiency causes; and suggest managerial implications to relevant business experts and managers in order to increase hotel efficiency in Crete and in other tourism destinations with similar characteristics. Design/methodology/approach - The sample is constituted by 50 superior hotels (luxury and class A) operating in Crete in 2008: 25 hotels are operating as totally independent and 25 hotels are operating under a brand. The efficiency for the above hotels is estimated through the data envelopment analysis methodology. Findings - First, nationally branded hotels are relatively the most efficient; internationally branded are the least efficient, while those operating under a local brand and the independent ones lie in between. This efficiency ranking can be explained by the interplay between operating under a brand and being flexible to changes in the local market's conditions. Second, the hotels' inefficiency cause is mainly due to the input/output configuration and not due to their management teams' performance to organize the inputs in the production process. Research limitations/implications - A direction for future research could be to enrich input and output variables. The paper could also be extended through a larger sample of hotels and an enriched data set covering more variables for more than one year, so as to study the dynamics of hotel efficiency. The larger sample could also contain hotels from other popular tourist destinations in Greece. Practical implications - The inefficiency causes are identified and, moreover, suggestions are made to hotel owners and managers, at the level of strategic and operational management, so as to increase hotel efficiency. Originality/value - This is the first study measuring hotel efficiency in Greece. Moreover, it identifies the inefficiency causes of hotels and offers suggestions, at the level of strategic and operational management, so as to increase hotel efficiency, which are applicable to Crete as well as to other tourism destinations with similar characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a direct comparison of destination image based on representative sample and empirical research of British first time visitors to the island of Corfu, Greece. The sample members were provided two questions, one at their arrival and before the departure. The study showed the pragmatic dimensions, indicated the priorities for management and marketing actions and recommended through comparison of a new kind of image.

The article presents a study on the different characteristics of the Greek islands of Lemnos and Hydra. The study showed that the economic parameters contribute on the perceptions of 400 residents of Hydra and Lemnos about tourism development. It revealed that there is a lessened perception on the negative impact of tourism on environment and society, particularly when the income is depended directly from tourism.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the blurred contours of the mythical landscapes of Greece acquired sharpness and definition in Western travelers' accounts and visual representations. They were experienced from the mobile elevated platform of steamboats and filtered through the lens of new visual technologies. Traversed by a new category of organized "scientific cruisers," the Greek landscape was a repository of universal values as well as a site of tensions: between a mythical ancient past and a geopolitically dynamic present; between poetic imagination and "clear" scientific observation; between land and sea. Sailing between these tensions, a new cosmopolitan community took shape. This, however, ultimately remained a western elite sailing at a distance from contemporary Greece and its people. It remained a metaphor for ephemeral utopian visions--like the idealized dioramic landscape through which it moved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the uses made by seventeenth-century travellers to the Greek world of their knowledge of classical texts. It refers to a range of travellers—in particular, Levant Company employees and individual adventurers or gentlemen travellers—and describes their educational background. It discusses the various purposes for which they incorporated quotations from and references to classical literature in the texts which resulted from their visits to Greece. Among these purposes are: the provision of aids to the identification of ancient sites, literary embellishment, and the drawing of moral lessons. It is clear from reading travel accounts that given the lack of contemporary guide books, authors such as Strabo and Pausanias were also an invaluable help on the ground. At the same time, by their use of classical texts, authors of travel narratives invited their readers to participate in an intellectual network of educated men (women are largely absent from the picture). These author-travellers saw themselves, rather than contemporary Greeks, as inheritors of classical culture. The paper refers in particular to George Sandys, John Covel, George Wheler, and Paul Rycaut. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses coastal leisure shipping activity in Greece and estimates its economic contribution to the national economy. Even though the activity is encompassed by the shipping transport sector and is supervised by the Ministry of Merchant Marine, its product appears to be offered exclusively to tourists. The magnitude of the economic contribution of coastal leisure shipping to the Greek economy is assessed through the implementation of the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA). Although the contribution of coastal leisure shipping to the national economy is not very substantial, it is significant to the local economies of the insular and coastal regions. The tourist 'day ships' constitute a dependable means of connecting the small islands with the larger islands and the ports of continental Greece. The role of the daily sea tours for the inhabitants of small islands is purely that of a means of transportation, since for most of them the tourist boats are an alternative, or sometimes the only means of connection with the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discute sobre la experiencia de viajar, sus habilidades de ampliar los horizontes de una viajero y generar perspectivas más positivas acerca del futuro del planeta. El autor describe miedos tenidos comúnmente cuando se contemplan las amenazas del futuro, y relata sus experiencias viajando en Grecia y las buenas memorias resultantes.

The Southern Sporades Island of Greece, or the Dodecanese as they came to be called around of the 20th century, the islands of the south-eastern Aegean, lie scattered between Crete and Asia Minor. Their two age-old and brilliant civilizations are historically-linked with these islands, which, great or small, inhabited or now uninhabited, number more than twenty, all bearing the traces of human habitation upon them. Today main characteristic of these islands is strong development of tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between Winckelmann and Pausanias — the one the author of the most extensive account of the topography of ancient Greece, the other among its most influential modern imaginators — might seem obvious, yet Pausanias has so far received little attention from writers on Winckelmann. This article shows the depth of Winckelmann's engagement with Pausanias, not only in areas of factual reference and citation but also in terms of ideological constraints and chronological scope. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

James George Frazer produced his magisterial translation and commentary of the Periegesis of Pausanias between 1884 and 1897; the six volumes of his Pausanias' Description of Greece were published in 1898. Like Pausanias, he was a reticent man. But the value of his commentary lies — beyond its interest to Classicists — in the ways Frazer's commitment to Pausanias prefigures and imbricates with his bigger comparative and anthropological projects, of which the most famous was The Golden Bough (first edition 1890, second edition 1900). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The history of the selection and extraction of Pausanias 7.22.4 — a passage about thirty square stones in the city of Pharae in Achaea — has proved one of the most significant matrices for the discussion of the primitive in both art and religion in Greece. From Winckelmann, via a great German tradition, to Tylor and Frazer in Britain, this piece explores the development of arguments about and interpretations of this text from the eighteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

River Ardas in Greece is an area of outstanding natural beauty and used as a recreation area. Each year the area is visited by people of all ages. Children visit the place either with their school or with their parents. It is important to study their views about the river as a recreation area. The children asked were pupils of the elementary schools of the region. All of these children had visited the area before. The majority of the children declare satisfied from their visit in the area and assess the landscape positively. However, most of them have a less positive view about the provided recreation services. Through the use of hierarchical loglinear analysis it becomes clear that pupils who declare from totally to very satisfied regarding their visit in the recreation area of Ardas also find that the provided recreation services range from very good to good. The same pupils also believe that that the river constitutes from very small to fair danger to their safety and visit the place more than five times a year. In addition, the pupils who visit the area more than five times a year think that the river constitutes from very small to fair danger to their safety. Most of the pupils think that the diversity of plants ranges from big to very big while the diversity of animals ranges from small to very small. There is a need for improved infrastructure in the area, e.g. observatories, so that pupils can discover the wild animals that live there. The love of the children for animals becomes obvious from the fact that they do not wish the prohibition of pets in the place. Most of the pupils like the idea of camping in the area with their parents but the idea of doing so with their fellow pupils is even more popular. The children think that their parents would find it easier to grant permission to them to camp in the area if they themselves accompanied their children and not if their children did so together with their fellow pupils. Through the test of independence it becomes obvious that the will of the children to camp in the area depends on the will of their parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the nature of pilgrimages connected to the New Age movement. Introductory comments are given discussing the validity of the term New Age and its primary distinctive features, particularly regarding the establishment of one's own themes and significance to the journey and its locations. Description is provided of the author's two personal pilgrimages to Greece. The trip's use of guided religious rituals and the author's experiences regarding themes of gender, warfare, and sacred space are each discussed in turn. Concluding remarks are also given relating to the importance of pilgrimage for all individuals.

The rise of mass tourism in the late 19th century coincided with advances in photographic technology that made it easier for travelers to document their journeys. In the 1890s, the clergyman and scientist T. R. R. Stebbing made a photographic record of his travels in the eastern Mediterranean. Stebbing's images reproduce a way of looking at antiquity prescribed by 19th-century guidebooks, thereby encoding a conventional Western view of antiquity. Incorporated into an academic network of slide collections, Stebbing's images contributed to an authoritative scholarly construction of the classical world in Britain during the early 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to 'promote' the use of moving image visual ethnography within tourism research while concurrently acknowledging the methodological and practical challenges inherent in the use of this method. The paper introduces Dziga Vertov's 1929 groundbreaking film 'The Man With the Movie Camera' and argues that a certain parallel can be drawn between the film and contemporary moving image visual ethnography in so far as the latter is, like Vertov's film, about the glimpses of the everyday as perceived by the researcher/filmmaker. Important within this context is the role of the 'self' of the researcher, something further explored through a case study of academic filmmaking, a project which investigates the construction and consumption of images of Greekness by visitors to the Athenian Acropolis. This case also highlights the practical challenges involved in adopting this method and investigates various filming techniques which could successfully be used by tourism researchers to either 'collect data' or create ethnographic documentaries, which can in turn be used for a range of other academic and pedagogic purposes. The paper concludes that being a 'researcher with a movie camera' although challenging can prove to be remarkably fruitful and rewarding, especially in the context of tourism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article returns to the question of the foundations of Western culture. Many have trod this path before, notably Nietzsche. At issue is a theory of culture, and the classical Greek preoccupation with how humans can make sense of their lives, find direction and some sort of vindication - for that is what culture is, and does. Travelling Greece today, what surprises is the vitality of the ancient sites. Alive with their own cast of timeless enchantment, it is as if they haven't changed over the millennia. Has this miraculous, enduring vitality something to do with the fact that the Western tree that Greece seeded continues to flourish? Or, is this just romantic illusion, a way to redeem the prosaic orders of modern everyday life; or, a fantasy aesthetico-religious culture to populate the disenchanted ruins of the Christian churchyard? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses on how the fourth grade students gather the information about ancient Greece without traveling. The fourth grade teacher of social studies, decided to have an activity describing a certain place. He asked some help from his co-teacher who happens to have seminars in Greece. The students have been involved in planning the trip, and writes several questions about Greece. While in Greece, the teacher is communicating with the students and provides all information they wanted.

Discusses the reflection of the research trips of Pausanias in his book "Periegesis." Analysis of experts on the preparations done by Pausanias in his travels; Practicalities of long-distance travel in ancient Greece; Citations of other travel descriptions of ancient Greece.

The cultural landscape of Greece includes strains of music, smells of incense, glittering mosaics, winds of the Maltimi, and images of ancient places. The five human senses are the basic receptors of impressions of this exploration of Greece. The realm of fantasy, imagination, and memory plays a part in coloring the images of this ancient European culture hearth. Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, occupies the southernmost extension of the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe. Even though Greece is a Mediterranean country there are wide variations of climate. Thessaly is the most prosperous part of central Greece, which also includes the administrative regions of East Greece, Central Greece, and Attica. INSET: ANCIENT BELIEFS: PART OF THE WORLD'S GREAT LITERATURE.

There is no better way to experience and learn about a country than by traveling to its different regions to gain first-hand observations of its geographic settings, culture, diversity, development, and generally, its way of life. Particularly with a place like Greece with a rich history and an acclaimed association with the development of Western civilization, one gets the advantage of being there to ponder about great Greek thinkers as well as things or events that happened in the past which shape our present-day life. Like most large cities of the modern world, Athens has amenities, problems, dust and dirt, crime, and tourists, but most importantly it has the Acropolis. Close to Athens and the Piraeus Cape Sounion, with its temple to Athena, is a landmark that told ancient mariners they were leaving home and heading out to unknown and distant ports. A novel by Mary Renault, The Bull from the Sea, very appropriately describes the island of Crete.

Greece is one of the most popular destinations worldwide, especially for mass tourism. However, there is an uneven development of tourism in the various Greek regions, due to the lack of appropriate touristic features related to tourism in its traditional sense. Under-developed tourist regions therefore have much to gain from alternative forms of tourism beyond the traditional beach holiday, so as to benefit from tourism's positive economic and social impacts. This paper explores the opportunities for the development of tourism in the regions of Northern Greece through alternative types of touristic attractions and includes a discussion on various suggested strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]