Hellenic Chamber of Hotels presents new online platform for Athens tourism

The Hellenic Chamber of Hotels presented during the 2nd Greek Tourism Expo on Friday its new website for booking and organizing trips which is also aimed at creating synergies in the Athens tourism sector.

The chamber’s president Giorgos Tsakiris announced that as of February, the site aims to offer hoteliers a booking tool, souvenir stores, restaurants and bars a platform to promote their businesses, travel agencies and car rental companies a chance to help visitors organize their trips, and tourists the opportunity to get helpful information about the Greek capital.

“Our ultimate goal is to expand the project across the country in the coming years”, Mr Tsakiris said and added that “in any case, the final outcome of the project will be judged by the mobilization and participation of tourism enterprises — regardless of their size or activity — in the platform and certainly by the synergies that will arise for our visitors".

Through the platform, the chamber intends to assist the transition of Athens’ tourism industry into the digital economy, develop new high technological value products/services and make them available to potential city visitors and tourists in accordance to the “dream – plan – book – visit – share” experience.

It will be multilingual (Greek, English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese) and is expected to include some 500 hotels, 2,000 tourism enterprises, 900 points of interest, activities, experiences, a 7-language tourist guide designed for mobile devices iOS, Android, Windows, e-tourism B2B and B2C services of third international bodies and businesses.

Visitors can use the travel package app and select a hotel, find information on how to go and return from the place of origin to/from Athens and proceed to booking through third party systems, identify sites and other attractions near the hotel of choice, organize entertainment and activities and plan out a personalized city tour.

Encouraging synergies

The platform is also aimed at encouraging synergies between different tourism service providers in order to launch personalized services to travellers that will strengthen and improve the overall visitor experience and this way promote good business practices that will have a strong multiplier effect on Athens’ tourism market.

It will be designed to support e-commerce in a modern way with digital services of Property & Channel Management, Reputation & Presentation Management, e-Coupons, Booking Engine.

According to the “Greek Geeks – Dataverse” consortium which created the platform, its basic design principles include organizing the content to promote the strategic goals (city break, congress etc.) through the comparative advantages of Athens, responsive Design, offering accessible tourism for the tourists with special needs, integrating third party systems services (skyscanner, rome2rio, google maps, reputation management etc.) and assuring compatibility with applications for mobile, user-friendly content management platform.

A pilot version of the platform will launch in February. In the meantime, the hotel chamber will plans to introduce the platform to all tourism businesses operating in Athens.