Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The King's Road links the Nordic capitals,
Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki to St Petersburg.
This concept emphasizes provincial and local
tourism developments along the road. The
touristic purpose of the King's Road was further
strengthened, when a cruise line started opera-
tions along the northern shore of the Gulf of
Finland in 2000. Improving Estonian access to
the EU, her northern provinces also joined this
project. New financial instruments will be used
to extend the project to the south, and thus
also link Latvian and Lithuanian cities to the
extension of the King's Road.
The third trans-national route is Via Baltica
Nordica, for which the provincial authorities
of southern Finland have argued for more than
a decade. It has been highly prioritized in the
Finnish international traffic policy. Now the
concept links Mo-i-Rana (Norway) with mid-
Swedish and Finnish provinces through Helsinki
to the Baltic capitals, Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius,
continuing to Warsaw and Berlin, or through
Kaliningrad directly through northern Poland to
Berlin. The main objective of the route is to
develop a chain of national economic develop-
ment zones in order to link the 'smart regions'
of the respective countries together (Hämeen
Liitto, 2002).
None of the bigger infrastructural develop-
ments has been very successful at the trans-
national level yet, and, for example, they do not
serve Finnish international ground traffic as effec-
tively as had been expected. In all the trans-
national projects, besides basic construction and
reconstruction of roads and railways, border-
crossing facilities, traffic services, safety systems
and information facilities for serving inter-
national tourism have been on the supra-
national agenda, but international coordination
is still scant and the border crossings are espe-
cially weakly organized.
domestic sources. The sub-sectors that benefit
from tourism income are:
personal and public transport and related
activities (44%);
●
accommodation, restaurants and catering
(17%);
●
travel agents, operators and tourism sup-
porting services (16%);
●
retail trade (13%);
●
petrol stations and car repairers (6%);
●
cultural, recreation, sports and activity
services (3%); and
●
other tourism-related industries (1%).
●
Across most of these sub-sectors the
ownership structure is based on small units and
micro-tourism enterprises (SMITEs), with only
few large or medium-sized firms. For example,
85% of the country's 10,100 hotels, restaurant
and catering enterprises employ fewer than
five people, and only 0.5% have more than 100
employees. The ten largest firms employ approx-
imately 20% of all the labour force (72,000)
in this sector. Approximately 28% of all the
tourism-related enterprises are located in the
Finnish countryside, and almost all of these can
be classified as SMITEs. Tourism is the main
source of income for only 25% of SMITEs, with
around 40% being part-time entrepreneurs
(Peltonen, Komppula and Ryhänen, 2004).
About three-quarters of all foreign travellers
visiting Finland are on a leisure trip. July is the
busiest month in general, but in Lapland
Christmas and the ski season are the busiest times
of the year. More than one-third of foreign travel-
lers regard Helsinki as their main destination in
Finland. About 5% of all the foreign visitors go to
Lapland (Finnish Tourist Board, 2004). Accord-
ing to research on organic images of Finland in
European markets, nature is a strong although not
overwhelming element of the image held by con-
tinental Europeans, both for those who have visi-
ted Finland and those who have not. As a whole,
winter elements are associated with Finland more
often than summer elements (e.g. the midnight
sun) (Komppula and Saraniemi, 2004).
Impacts of Baltic Countries'
EU Accession on the Finnish
Tourism Industry
The Finnish tourism industry
General impacts and perspectives
Although tourism is increasingly being recog-
nized as an export industry in Finland, over
80% of tourism income currently comes from
The impacts of Baltic enlargement on the
Finnish tourism industry were investigated by
