Athens 2004 Olympic Games - A challenge for the Hotel Sector of Athens and Greece

Abstract

Traditionally, there has been a clear separation between sports and tourism, two sectors of activity that seemed unrelated until recent times. Tourism is the number one industry in the world. It was comprised of nearly 700 million international travelers worldwide in the year 2000, and represented a total expenditure of more than US $ 476 billion. Domestic travel represents a movement of people several times greater.

On the other hand, sports are without a doubt the number one industry within the leisure sector. The impact of the professional practice of sports has become a global phenomenon. Sportsmen and –woman from various sports become global heroes and role models for dress, behavior, attitudes. Moreover, amateur sport and leisure sport are becoming increasingly important in a stressed society where individuals need alternative ways to relax and develop their character.

The Olympic Games are certainly the biggest sports event in the world as well as a major tourist attraction that will, or not, consolidate the organizers’ city as a future tourism destination depending mostly on post-Games management of both brand image and tourism potential. The benefits derived from such a hallmark event are mainly economical, socio- cultural, and organizational, but for Athens and Greece the upcoming Olympic Games will have a deeper meaning and a historical dimension as they constitute one of the points of reference for the ancient Greek civilization.

The present study focuses on the 2004 Olympic Games that will take place in Athens and its objective is to critically examine the hotel development that the Games will bring to Athens and Greece.

Athens is likely to experience an actual re-built, just like Barcelona did in 1992, where a “new city” was built in order to cope with the requirements of the 1992 Olympic Games. The hotel sector in Athens and Greece is already experiencing changes in order to tackle the challenges of the post-Olympic tourism period; confronting the seasonal nature of Greek tourism, enhancing Greece’s competitive advantages in tourism and advancing other tourism fields, to name but a few challenges.

The pre-requisite for the hotels’ successful Olympic preparations, calls for a closely-related coordination between government bodies and the hoteliers, something apparent in the so far existing communications and decisions. Having this orientation, large hotel units are also preceding with their strategic planning towards the post Olympic tourism trends; as such, noteworthy cooperations can be seen among the Athens’ hotels, as well as investment decisions on behalf of multi-national companies regarding Greek hotels, aiming to lead into a deeper penetration of the widely enlarged post-Olympic Greek tourism market.

The significance of the results in this study lays initially in the business and investment interest that the Olympic Games will bring upon the hotel sector in Athens and Greece. Businessmen will actually realize that Greece has moved well beyond the period where it was exclusively considered as a “sea-sun-sand” destination. Business opportunities are already apparent and are expected to be multiplied as we come closer to the event of the Olympic Games in Athens. Finally, the results’ significance lays in the context of the prolongation of the Greek tourism season, as particular consideration is given to advance the forms of tourism that can lead the way to the success of this attempt.