Industry Reports & Trends

Thessaloniki recorded 31.09 percent more foreign overnights at its hotels during the first nine months of 2011 when compared to the corresponding period in 2010, while overnights by Greeks fell by 5.5 percent, according to recent figures released by the Thessaloniki Hotels Association.

“The socio-political events and the effects of the economic crisis that has plagued our country and its citizens, has transformed Greece into an undesirable destination that frightens organizers, sponsors and conference delegates and presents Greek professionals as unreliable and insolvent,” Hellenic Association of Professional Congress Organizers (HAPCO) President Dinos Astras stressed last month during his opening speech at the association’s 7th Pan-Hellenic Conference.

“With the current bipartisan composition of the Culture and Tourism Ministry, we will not understand, justify, explain, accept or even tolerate the possibility of failure to implement concrete promises, commitments and agreed procedures towards a common direction,” Yiannis Retsos, president of the Athens-Attica Hotel Association said in late November 2011 during the association’s 42nd Annual General Assembly.

“We were considered a heavy industry until the State decided to proceed with the collection of property tax through electricity,” President of the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels Yiorgos Tsakiris said during the chamber’s first ever general meeting hosted at the Metropolitan Expo Center in Athens. The general meeting was organized on the sidelines of the Xenia hospitality equipment trade fair, held 25-28 November 2011.

Tourism professionals appeared satisfied with bookings during the Athenian exodus of the 28 October weekend holiday when compared with those recorded in previous years for the same period, the Greek press said last month.

Although the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises’ (SETE) tenth annual tourism and development conference was slightly overshadowed by Greek political instability and uncertainty last month it will remain in history as a conference first of its kind that took a step further and held a dialogue between the Government and all opposition parties.

Bookings in four- and five-star hotels of the Greek capital in August recorded a slight increase of 1.13 percent over the same month last year, according to data released recently by the Athens-Attica Hotel Association.

Athens experienced a 4.67 percent decrease in international arrivals in September compared to the same month in 2010, according to recent figures released by the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises (SETE).

“Our first priority is to attract more investment to Greece through tourism in order to attract more visitors… These are the two main pillars we are working on,” Culture and Tourism Minister Pavlos Yeroulanos said to the press last month after he presented the government’s strategy for the development of Greek tourism for 2011-2021 to the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises’ (SETE) Board of Directors.

Greece this year fell another seven places in the rankings of 142 countries from 83rd place to 90th in the Global Competitiveness Report 2011-2012, released by the World Economic Forum last month.
Greece remains the lowest-ranked country of the European Union and is below Georgia and Lebanon and many African and Balkan countries.