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Konstantia Darvidou, Evangelos Siskos: Digital Marketing Tools in the EU Tourism Sector

INTRODUCTION
Many European Union countries have a well-developed tourism sector, which
provides a substantial contribution to economic growth, employment and exports in
st
those countries. In the 21 century marketing of accommodation, transportation and
other tourism related services should adjust to new technological trends such as
digitalization. This affects marketing campaigns’ reach and costs. Enterprises try to
use those marketing tools, which provide the best efficiency. New domains of digital
tools gain popularity among potential customers (Kanan Fadani (2023).. It is not
enough to have just only a company website with essential information and booking
option. A wider set of tools becomes a sophisticated mix aiming to fit the needs and
trends among tourists. Greece is a country where tourism is an important economy
driver. It is a member state of the EU. Therefore, analysis of other member states’
experiences in this field can be interesting for its tourism enterprises and government
policy. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the scope of use and efficiency of the main
digital marketing tools used by the EU accommodation business and travel
intermediary enterprises in the modern period of technological development.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Researchers nowadays switch their focus from traditional to digital marketing tools. The
same regularity takes place in tourism sector too. Digital marketing tools can initiate
changes in attitudes, encourage trying novel activities and locations, demonstrate a new
perspective on already known destinations, support sustainable tourism, and engage
new segments of tourists (Murto et al., 2025). Internet and social media are important
tools to maintain customers’ loyalty to destinations in European countries (Almeida-
Santana & Moreno-Gil, 2017). Kontis et al. (2019) marked fast growth of e-
intermediaries, which provide a competitive pressure on traditional tourism companies.
But Igoumenakis & Giannoukou (2025) mentioned challenges in digital marketing as
well: insufficient skills, increased competition, and data protection issues.

Despite narrowing gap in general digitalization of the EU countries, there are still
divergent behaviour patterns in use of ICTs in tourism (travel and accommodation)
sector. For example, in 2016 in Luxemburg several times more tourists used internet
for travel and accommodation services than in Bulgaria and Romania (Navío-Marco
et al., 2018). Among 30 European countries in 2017, Internet booking for
accommodation was the most popular in Malta (55%), Belgium (45%) and Germany
(45%). The lowest value was in Romania (3%), Bulgaria (5%) and Croatia (12%).
Internet booking is more practiced in rich economies with better digital skills and
higher expenditure per trip (Saseanu et al., 2020).

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