Greece Cashed in 14.1bn Receipts from Tourists in 2015

Tourist arrivals in Greece reached 26 million last year, up 5.6 percent compared to 2014, according to the Bank of Greece’s (BoG) final data on the 2015 tourism season released on Thursday. BoG’s data showed that the rise in arrivals to Greece boosted the country’s travel industry receipts by 5.5 percent to 14.1 billion euros compared to 2014.

In particular, receipts from euro area residents increased by 10.2 percent to 6,009 million euros, while receipts from residents of non-euro area countries of the EU28 rose by 21.6 percent to 3,395 million euros.

Among major countries of origin, receipts from Germany rose by 12.5 percent to 2,245 million euros, those from France by 5.8 percent to 1,194 million euros and those from the United Kingdom by 30.1 percent to 2,020 million euros.

Among non-EU28 countries, receipts from Russia dropped by 63.6 percent to 421 million euros, while those from the United States increased by 44 percent to 943 million euros.

In regards to the cruise market, last year 4,375 cruise ship arrivals (against 3,858 in 2014) and 5,118 cruise passenger visits (against 4,918 in 2014) were recorded. The 2015 cruise data was collected from 16 Greek ports, covering 85.4 percent of all cruise ship arrivals in the country. Moreover, the data showed that 90.5 percent of all cruise passengers in Greece were transit visitors, with an average of 2.0 stopovers at Greek ports of call, virtually unchanged from 2014.

Based on the BoG’s final data, the surplus of the balance of travel services in Greece was 12,088 million euros in 2015, up 6.8 percent from a surplus of 11,317 million euros in 2014.