New Tourism Measures Support Airlines, Employment

Minister of transport and communications, Evripidis Stylianidis, and minister for employment and social protection, Fani Palli-Petralia, recently announced measures to support the tourism sector.

Specifically, Mr. Stylianidis announced the suspension of airline’s slot fees at Greece’s regional airports from April to September. The measure, however, does not apply to Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos.”

Mr. Stylianidis said that the measure is an attempt to boost charter-flight traffic and provide additional incentives to international tour operators to plan low-priced travel packages to Greece.
He also noted that the government would spend some three million euros for improvements to Greece’s regional airports.

On the employment side, minister of employment and social protection, Fani Palli-Petralia, officially signed the support measures she had first announced in March.

According to Mrs. Petralia, the Manpower Employment Organisation (OAED) will provide subsidies of 50 million euros for some 50,000 seasonal hotel employees.

Thus, between 30 April and 31 May, hotel enterprises can proceed to hire the same amount of staff they employed during the same period in 2008. The subsidies will correspond to the seasonal unemployment benefit received by each employee.

In an attempt to boost domestic tourism the second measure sees 750,000 people entitled to social tourism vouchers, as opposed to last year when beneficiaries amounted to 520,000 people.

In addition, the National Strategic Reference Framework will soon set up a 45-million-euro vocational training program for tourism. The program is to benefit 3,500 unemployed. Some 30 percent of these trainees will be hired by the tourism enterprises that participate in the subsidized program.