“Greek Breakfast”: A New Tourism Brand Name for an Age-Long Gastronomy Tradition

Current trends in international tourism market portray gastronomic tourism as one of the most powerful elements for enriching tourist experience while increasing destination competitiveness. As a result, over the past years significant efforts have been recorded to effectively use local gastronomic culture as a vehicle for development in mature and emerging destinations. “Greek Breakfast” is an innovative program which was successfully designed and implemented by the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels, in order to enrich breakfast content in hotels with local agro-dietary products, as well as with traditional foods and viands from various parts of Greece. The program, by taking advantage of the rich and diverse Greek gastronomic tradition, aims at differentiating the identity of the Greek hotel product, while at the same time it advances conditions for the development of local production structures through immediate (local) as well as implicit (exports) consumption. Until today, the program “Greek Breakfast” attracted substantial number of businesses (hotels and producers) by creating, establishing and projecting a new, distinct touristic product for the Greek hotel industry. The current efforts have focused on increasing the acceptability and usability of the “Greek Breakfast” at national as well as international level, through a complete nexus of digital marketing actions that target different groups of interest. The philosophy of redesigning the program, will be based on the extensive use of New Technologies of Information and Communications (ICT), Web 2.0 tools, interactive links and online networking open to all target groups (hotel owners, national-international tourists/clients, producers).