Climate Perception: Greece most resilient to global warming among Med destinations

Mabrian data indicates that France, the United Kingdom and the United States are the most sensitive key outbound markets for this region to climate perception, showing the importance of unveiling insights based on data to align travellers’ expectations with their actual experience and future demand.

Readiness and data insights to deal with climate change effects and its impact on destinations’ perception can make a difference when designing and executing promotional strategies, to ensure travellers’ expectations do not fall far from the actual experience. This is one of the main arguments we took to the Resilience Council panel, held this week in Arabian Travel Market 2024.

Carlos Cendra, Mabrian's Chief Marketing and Communications Officer joined this round table with Nikolaos Gkolfinopoulos, Head of Tourism at ICF; Alastair Crossley, Global Head of Travel Solutions at AXA; Ali Haider Director of Middle East and Africa at Fragomen/Nomadic; and Elizabeth Maclean, Co-Managing Director at Herdwick Communications.

To address how resilience and visitors’ perception are key to building, protecting, and projecting any destination's reputation and brand image around the world, we used as an example the influence of climate change, in particular global warming, in the travellers’ perception of five competing Mediterranean countries (Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Portugal), during summer 2023.

Mabrian featured data on the Climate Perception Index (PCI by its acronym) for these Mediterranean destinations’ key source markets (United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, United States, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark). The higher the index is, the more satisfied travellers are with the weather in the destination, as their expectations are being met. The aim was to provide context on the impact of the record-high temperatures reached last summer, on a year that, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, was the hottest ever, as warming is two times faster in Europe than the global average.

When analysing the 2023 summer season, Portugal’s and Greece’s Climate Perception Index show the most consistent performance, thus a better perception in this regard among all source markets analysed. Portugal is the destination that has a better overall Climate Index Perception (90,8 points on average, of 100 possible), even though the summer heat has a clear effect, pushing the index down in July and August. Greece (88,8 points on average) is the only destination analysed with a more stable climate perception throughout the months studied.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations, Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

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