Competitive strategies in the tourist hotel industry: Evidence from Greece

Abstract

The tourism sector in Greece has shown very important points of recovery, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, being one of the steam engines of the Greek economy, contributing to its all-important economic terms and parameters. The above elements make the sector highly competitive, and the assessment of its competitiveness as well as the choice of the appropriate development strategies is a matter of particular importance (Chikan et al., 2022). On the other hand, competitiveness is a wide concept which can be estimated either using the Porter’s Diamond Model or financial indexes (Fischer & Schornberg, 2007). Taking this into account, the purpose of this paper is to assess the competitiveness of three of the largest Greek hotel units in economic terms with the use of financial indexes, as well as to determine the most suitable strategies for their further development, trying to fill the existing gap in the literature for the tourism hotel sector in Greece. The main results show that improving indicators such as liquidity and maintaining a good capital structure contribute to maintaining the sector’s sustainability and its further development holding special importance both for academics and policymakers taking into consideration the contribution of tourism to the whole Greek economy.