Tourism campaign afoot
The government will spend nearly 60 million euros on an advertising campaign promoting tourism abroad, Tourism Development Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos said yesterday. Of this, 31.9 million euros will be spent on the main campaign and 28 million on «supplementary targeted action,» Avramopoulos said in a radio interview. The campaign, designed to attract more visitors to Greece, has been in full swing since Dec. 18. In the next few days, outdoor advertisements, in the form of posters, exhibitions at railway stations, video wall spots and advertisements on public transport vehicles will be unveiled in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, he said. Additional advertisements will be carried by global and national networks, newspapers in the UK, the US, Germany and Belgium and news magazines. Avramopoulos bemoaned the lack of adequate advertising ahead of last summer’s Athens Olympics which had a negative impact on visitor numbers during the Games and the last quarter of 2004. He referred to increasing competition from cheaper destinations such as Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey, adding that the gap in the cost will only be surmounted by offering better-quality services.
