Industry Reports & Trends

The “highly disappointing” figures of hotel occupancy in the Greek capital were confirmed late June by the Athens-Attica Hotel Association in collaboration with GBR Consulting.

The Tourism Ministry and the City of Athens last month said they would join forces and soon announce measures aimed for the tourism development of the Greek capital, which sees its arrivals tumbling year by year.

“The political stability that has resulted from the 17 June elections and the formation of the Government already has influenced recent reservations on a positive level,” Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni said while addressing a conference last month.

“At the beginning of the year I referred to a particularly difficult tourism season but now, based on the rate bookings are moving in Athens, I will now refer to a collapse,” the president of the Hellenic Federation of Hoteliers, Yiannis Retsos, told tourism journalists recently.

Yacht reservations dropped some 30 percent in May only, compared with the same period in 2011, while the industry expected better results from last minute bookings, according to the general secretary of the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises (SETE), George Vernicos.

International bookings dropped some 50 percent only a few days after Greece’s general elections, according to Andreas Andreadis, president of the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises (SETE).

A 30-percent-drop forecast for bookings was made last month for this tourism season by Greek tourism professionals, during a workshop held by Germany’s leading travel industry media group FVW Mediengruppe in Athens.

Greece ranked 100th place in its global competitiveness compared to the 101st position the previous year, according to the results of the annual World Bank Group “Doing Business Report 2012” announced recently.

Business expectations in Greece’s tourism sector continued to decline in the first quarter of 2012 compared to the previous quarter, according to a recent survey conducted by the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises (SETE) in collaboration with the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research (IOBE).

Over one million Russian tourists are expected to visit Greece this year, according to predictions made at the Greek Forum 2012 held in Rodos recently. The forum was organized by Russian tourism organization Labirint.