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Irish low cost carrier Ryanair will connect Thessaloniki with four European destinations within the framework of its cooperation with the Thessaloniki Tourism Organization, Ryanair’s Sales and Marketing Executive Director Ida Buonanno said recently in Thessaloniki.

The “E-Tourism & Travel Distribution in Southern Europe & Mediterranean” conference was the first of its kind in Athens and attracted renowned names from the e-travel world and presented the current challenges and trends in the travel market.

The average occupancy rate of hotels in Thessaloniki last year showed a decline of 13 percent compared to 2009 thus closing 2010 at 42 percent, the president of the Thessaloniki Hotels Association, Aristotelis Thomopoulos, said last month during the association’s annual pita cutting ceremony.

Louis Cruises recently announced that its luxurious Louis Majesty would now perform cruises in the Aegean Sea next summer from Piraeus, Greece.

Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, announced last month that Luis Maroto, former Deputy CEO of Amadeus, has replaced David V. Jones as President and CEO of the company.

European Expo will host the first International Cultural, Religious and Pilgrimage Tourism Exhibition from 31 March to 3 April in Athens. The four-day tourism exhibition will focus on religious, cultural and historical treasures.

The Hellenic Chamber of Hotels announced last month that it plans to network all Greek hotels with the Amber Alert system to help distribute notices of missing children with the help of hoteliers.

Two postgraduate study programs on religious tourism are to operate through partnerships of three Greek universities and the Church of Greece, according to a framework agreement signed recently at an assembly hosted at the Holy Monastery of Penteli.

Chaotic bureaucracy, ski resorts that do not bear the appropriate GNTO seal due to land-use matters and the strong competition from neighboring countries are just some of the problems of Greek ski tourism, experts stressed at a recent forum held in Athens for the development of ski tourism in Greece.

One in three tourists who visited Spain from October 2009 until April 2010, participating in the Europe Senior Tourism project subsidized by the Spanish government, were from Greece, according to Javier Bustamante, president of tourism and innovation company Segittur.