Trade Associations

The new tourism museum would add to tourism’s connection with culture and contribute to the awareness of tourism students, tourism business executives and tour operators, Tourism Minister Kostas Markopoulos recently said after the signing of a Memorandum of Cooperation for the establishment of a tourism museum and a toy museum.

No advertising campaign, no matter how ambitious it is, can deliver if the visitor does not feel safe and does not like what he sees when he walks around, according to the President of the Hellenic Association of Travel and Tourist Agencies (HATTA), Argyro Phili.

Tourism Minister Kostas Markopoulos called a meeting during the summer to focus on the issue of security in downtown Athens on the occasion of the peak tourist season.

In a letter addressed to Tourism Minister Kostas Markopoulos, the President of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Konstantinos Michalos, called for the tourism ministry to abandon its plans to convert the hotel chamber into a tourism chamber.

Greek Deputy Interior Minister Christos Markoyiannakis recently met with British Foreign Office Minister Chris Bryant to crack down on drunken British tourists that tend to cause trouble on Greek island resorts.

The number of foreign tourists that arrived at Greek airports fell to eight percent in the January-July period down from 9.6 percent recorded during the first six months of the year, according to the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises.

The summer holiday traffic is expected to accelerate the new influenza A (H1N1) across Europe, the European Commission recently warned.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) recently announced that international air passenger traffic fell by 7.2 percent in June when compared to the same month in 2008. However, the drop in international passenger demand was a slight improvement on the 9.3 percent fall in May.

Tourism revenue dropped 14.7 percent in the January-June period against the same period in 2008 as foreign visitors spent some 3.1 billion euros, the Bank of Greece recently announced. In June receipts were down 10.4 percent to 1.39 billion euros.

Associations that represent professional and private owners of yachts have reacted to the draft law of the Ministry of Economy and Finance that levies new taxes on the yachting industry.