Spatial Structure of Tourist Supply and Relations Between Sub-Regions : A Case Study in a Coastal Region, Greece

At the duration of previous decades has been realised important research with regard to the results and the repercussions of tourism in local level. Even if the tourism is often represented as industry of low impact, the researchers have begun to recognize the tourism as a factor of environmental change. The tourism is considered as the activity that eminently expresses spatial interaction. That means, that the characteristic elements two or more units of space affect each other. The effective spatial management of is an increasing competitive and complicated undertaking, that requires the help of economic, social and geographical elements for the process of planning and development. Taking into consideration the heterogeneous nature of the tourism phenomenon and organisational and functional structures of tourist destinations, especially the coastal areas, it is obvious that it is enough difficult to delimit with precision the tourism sector, as a single total of competences, that they are distinguished easily by the remainder policies of tourist destinations, and to record the spatial changes in the tourism. This work faces an important challenge in the field of tourism and the basic aim of this paper is to present the economic relations between sub-regions in a coastal area in Greece, and spatial concentration of economic activities and examination of communities in the sense of socio-economic characteristics, emphasising in the analysis of the correlation between employment in the tourism sector and other economic activities. Furthermore, the geographical distribution of tourist lodgings, constitutes a very widely used clue in the measurement of spatial fluctuations of tourist activity. This is owed because the tourist lodging constitutes one of the more important elements of tourist product with material substance, so that it can be also still measured, and data which concern in the geographical distribution of tourist lodgings, provide useful elements with regard to the importance of tourism and its spatial structure.