Contribution of natural and socio-cultural resources in tourism development of Mainland Greek prefectures: A typology

Abstract

Shortly after the Second World War, the considerable increase in tourist flows to Greece as well as to other countries, created the necessary conditions for tourism to become a major factor of economic and regional development. The volume of tourist flows to each region and consequently the region's prospects of development are influenced by certain factors, which create comparative advantages for the region and differentiate it from the rest of the areas in terms of tourist attractiveness. In this article, we attempt to group the mainland Greek prefectures into clusters in terms of their tourist resources (natural resources and socio-cultural resources). This is done so that we achieve an overall understanding of each prefecture's potential for tourism development given the fact that there is a large variety of tourist characteristics amongst the prefectures. By using hierarchical cluster analysis we examine two models of formation the mainland prefectures and we also try to interpret the differentiations in tourist attractiveness amongst the prefectures. Two distinctive clusters/territorial units result from the analysis, each one representing a different type of tourism development. The first cluster consists of the coastal prefectures whereas the second cluster comprises the hinterland, non-coastal prefectures.