Boukas, Nikolaos

The consumption of the tourist product relates to a series of visitor experiences that shape overall visitor evaluation. Such experiences pertain to how visitors sense, relate and act when consuming these products. Museums, safeguarding cultural heritage, contribute significantly to this experience by providing exclusive insights and interaction with (in) authentic exhibits of many areas, such as islands. Nonetheless, in many islands, museums have not been fully developed as destination features and thus, significant opportunities to utilise museums' visitor experience to enrich the tourist offering, are lost. In this respect, the paper examines the experiences of tourists with cultural museums in the island of Cyprus, from the policy makers and museums' managers' perspective. Specifically, through face to face interviews with 13 representatives of tourism policy/museums, the study indicates that the role of museums is important for the formation of visitor/tourist experiences while certain elements appeal to visitors' engagement in museum settings. The paper concludes that museums could provide holistic memorable experience that can help actively diversify the tourism products of islands. In this respect, emphasis must be given upon how experiences are created having in mind also that visitors are increasingly becoming value co-creators in this experience.

Even though the central role of advertising in consumer behaviour is well-documented, pertinent research on financial advertising is limited for both investor-owned companies and co-operatives. This becomes especially important in today's turbulent financial times. To this end, the study investigated the effect of advertising on the selection and perceived loyalty of Cypriot consumers of financial co-operatives, prior and during the financial crisis and the restructuring of the island's banking industry. The findings suggest that advertising has a marginal role in the said decision-making stages but essentially provide insights that open a window of opportunity for financial advertisers to develop effective advertisements. It is proposed that during the crisis, corporate and informational advertising should mainly be employed and such advertisements should communicate the service elements that, as a result of the increased perceived risk evoked by the crisis, have become salient. These service dimensions relate for the selection stage to reliability factors, and for the cementing of loyalty to solvency and process factors associated with relationship building.