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“It is very important for our country that we are participating for the first time in a consistent European initiative that aims to attract tourism to Europe,” Deputy Culture and Tourism Minister George Nikitiadis said last month after signing a memorandum of understanding to increase tourist flows between South America and Europe.

“Greece is expected to welcome some 200,000 Chinese tourists to Greece by 2015,” the president of the Hellenic-Chinese Union for Economical, Commercial and Cultural Communications, Lan Xiao Cheng, said last month during a briefing on attracting the Chinese market to Greece.

Culture and Tourism Minister Pavlos Yeroulanos recently highlighted the importance of free movement of tourists around the world and underlined the need to change the Schengen visa procedure in order for it “to stop being a burden on tourism.

Deputy Culture and Tourism Minister George Nikitiadis recently presented the conclusions of a report on the development and promotion of religious and pilgrimage tourism in Greece.

“The international and Greek student community is a huge ‘reservoir’ from which Greek regions could draw visitors from throughout the academic year,” Yiorgos Telonis, president of Hellenic Association of Travel and Tourist Agencies (HATTA), said during the announcement of the new institutional and developmental framework of school trips.

Fast track procedures for tourism investments are underway at the Culture and Tourism Ministry and the Greek National Tourism Organization via the establishment of a special service that will promote and license tourism investments.

Recent data showed that incoming tourism to Greece increased last year (10 percent increase in arrivals and revenue) but nothing guarantees that the same will happen in 2012, the general director of the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises (SETE), George Drakopoulos, said at the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce’s 22nd Greek Economy Conference “The Time for Responsibility, Decisions & Action” that took place in Athens in mid-December.

The time period for the Greek National Tourism Organization (GNTO) to grant licenses for Greek tourist accommodation will be reduced from 240 days to 60 days, according to arrangements contained in an omnibus bill presented in late December 2011 by Culture and Tourism Minister Pavlos Yeroulanos.

The Culture and Tourism Ministry signed a memorandum of understanding for cooperation in the field of tourism with the United Arab Emirates within the framework of the two-day UAE-Greek Economic Forum held last month at Lagonissi of the Attica region.

“Tourism went well this year,” Culture and Tourism Minister Pavlos Yeroulanos said during an interview to the Greek press in late December.