DEVELOPING INDICATORS FOR CAPTURING THE AIRPORTS DYNAMICS IN REGIONAL AND TOURISM DEVELOPMENT: EVIDENCE FROM GREECE

Abstract

Air transport is an aspect of the transportation and communication sector, it is a capital and technology intensive component of the national economies, and it plays an important role in communication and trade, in tourism development, and generally in the economic and regional development. The major role of air transport in the support of distant communication makes it a valuable tool for the strategic planning and innovative marketing in tourism, especially for tourism policies addressed to international markets. Within this context, this paper studies air transport in Greece and particularly the regional dimension of the Greek air transport, by excluding the metropolitan airports of Athens and Thessaloniki. The paper examines the factors that determine the attractiveness of the Greek regional airports on data referring to air traffic statistics and on available spatial and tourism information. For measuring the dynamics of the regional airports in Greece in regional development, the paper introduces a composite index, which computes passenger-traffic change between time periods by considering an airports’ classification. Next, for measuring the airport dynamics in tourism development, an index is introduced in terms of the international arrivals and overnights per region. The results of applying the proposed indices comply with the observations of the common practice and they seem sufficient to be used in other areas of application. The overall approach provides a novel measure for air transport studies and it illustrates the contribution of the small and regional airports to tourism and regional development in Greece.