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The Council of State reportedly said the supreme administrative court has rejected as illegal initial plans for the 94-million-euro glass and concrete New Acropolis Museum project.

It’s not only local cruise companies — for the first half of this year cruise passengers on Greek vessels are down some 30% over the same period last year — that face difficulties this year.

Deputy Development Minister Dimitris Georgakopoulos unveiled plans to build a state-of-the-art tourism complex that would include popular alternate forms of tourism such as spa, marine and golf facilities.

Government last month announced the approval of a new “Railway-Airport-Public Transport” business plan worth almost 3 billion euros. The lion’s share of the funds, some 2 billion euros, goes to modernizing Greece’s rail network, particularly the Athens-Thessaloniki and Athens-Patras links. The basic aims of the program are to modernize transportation services and to reduce the far-reaching repercussions this sector has on the environment.

Two recent very notable announcements allow Greece to boast as perhaps being the country with the world’s best and cleanest swimming waters in the world. It began last month when the country was awarded a record 373 Blue Flags this year for its clean beaches and safe swimming waters. This marks more than a decade of a continual and successful drive by the local operator of the program, the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Nature, to make Greece one of the top countries in Europe that participates in the EU program.

Greece’s newest golf course opens this month on the island of Crete. Owners say it is the most challenging golf course in Greece and one that will be meticulously maintained. The course takes in the typical ancient landscape of Crete and will host many of the visitors that come here to enjoy the island’s sunshine and history. The Crete Golf Club says it will offer the best of golf with 18 holes in a desert course design. “Each hole individually sculptured, seamlessly blending into the existing landscape.”

Athens ranks as the 71st most expensive city worldwide, according to the Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s first cost of living survey for 2003, against a placing of 111th last year. Using New York as a base measure of 100, the semi-annual survey, which covers 144 cities, compares the cost of more than 200 items in each location, including housing, food, clothing, household goods, transport and entertainment.

In the idyllic surroundings of Philopappou Hill, opposite the Acropolis, in the Dora Stratou garden-theatre, regional cultures come to life during the warm Athenian summer nights.

The 10th anniversary of Arabian Travel Market, the Middle East’s premier travel and tourism exhibition, which began a four day run at Airport Expo Dubai, highlighted the resilience of the tourism industry in the aftermath of war and in the face of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Along with their own booking systems for domestic and international ferry routes, Superfast Ferries and Blue Star Ferries now have their routes on the FORTHcrs reservation system. An agreement between Attica Enterprises, which controls both above mentioned ferry lines, and the Forthnet group was signed last month.