Tourism Properties Turned Over to Private Investors

A number of properties of the Tourism Development Company are soon to turned over to private enterprises through long-term leasing agreements, and thus bring some much-needed coins to the state.

The properties include the casino on Corfu, the marinas at Neo Faliron and Alimos, the golf course at Afantou on Rodos and seven Xenia hotels. The development company also announced that it intends to have them all leased by early 2006.

In a similar announcement, the company accused Hellenic Tourism Organization property administrators of not properly utilizing properties it acquired more than 20 years ago, with the state facing the risk of losing some of these assets.

In particular, it cited the Xenia group of hotels, which represented an exciting time for tourism and architecture in a modern Greece as it recovered from World War II and the Civil War.

This units graced the covers of European architecture magazines. They also starred in Greek films, showing the elegance and cosmopolitan air of their locales.

For Greece, the Xenia hotels were an experiment that combined politics, architecture and economics. Private and public money helped build 40 of these top-notch hotels between 1950 and 1967.

A Greek architecture journal once praised the facilities for “combining American financing with Greek public funds” in a low-cost, high-quality result.