The myth of 'hypertourism': Greece's tourism revenues in key destinations are 20-30% lower this year than in 2023

2024 has not been a good year for Greek foreign tourism. The actual data (if we leave aside the pretense of favouring “overtourism”) shows a decline in income for local communities in the Cyclades, Crete, the west/southwest Peloponnese, Chalkidiki and the Sporades.

On some islands, revenue declines range from 20 to 40%

Although there are still at least 2 months left in the season, the damage is already visible. Only Turkey and some Balkan countries (Bulgaria) are showing growth in tourist flow, but this is the so-called “tourism for the poor”: the same amount as the average American or Arab tourist spends per day in Mykonos or Santorini, 50 Bulgarian tourists spend per day in Northern Greece. But just because “countryside tourism” is everywhere in Greece does not mean that it does not put a strain on water, communications and electricity networks.

There are many of them, they spend little, and they are a burden on a country that cannot serve a population of 9.5 million people (Greek by birth and foreign by origin) with more than twice that number of tourists!

Typical case and what was said about Santorini: Santorini is experiencing, if not a bad, then certainly a very mediocre tourist season. Nothing like the glory of 2019 in terms of receipts and arrivals for a stay of at least five days. Tourists arrive by cruise ship, run at a “waltz” pace through the main attractions and leave the island in the evening, often without having spent a cent on it. How much “ink was spilled” or rather “keyboards were broken” because of the mayor's recommendation to limit the travel of locals, since “17,000 tourists are expected” per day.

17,000 tourists a day actually arrive

They have made and continue to make such “raids” on islands that cannot afford it. The worst scarecrow for the islanders is tourists from cruise ships! Who do nothing but eat ice cream, at worst buy some souvenir, use local transport and that's it! And of course, not only the local infrastructure suffers from this, but also local residents.

They “cry” for the “good” tourist who came and paid for the island's expensive hotels and visited taverns and restaurants, and now can't even walk along the alleys and get serviced properly because of the “locusts” of cruise liners.

About another “flagship” of Greek tourism, Mykonos, there is no talk: Despite having clearly better infrastructure than Santorini, the vilification the island has suffered from the government has hit its revenue hard.

The fact that Mykonos seems to be “a zone of combat operations of criminal organizations” is aggravated by constant and almost daily checks by the department for combating racketeering of security organizations, when tourists spending from 50,000 euros a daythey see how the Greek police are taking away those who are guarding them! Instead of pursuing criminals who cause this security deficit on the island, they persecute those they consider… “competitors”!

To top it all off, the prices are incredibly high.

And the tourists decided that “Greece is not worth that kind of money.” Athens, as the fastest growing domestic tourist market with a big growth in the last five years, confirms this: they don't like the city, they find it too ugly and the reviews are too bad. Only the south-eastern suburbs (Glyfada, Voula, Vouliagmeni, Varkiza) receive positive reviews, but still only for a few: a meal for two in a seaside fish tavern costs about 200 euros, and in a restaurant – up to 400 euros, and that's without big fish! How can tourists with an average income come if for just one meal in these areas of Athens they demand their income for several days?

More specifically, Greece's key tourism market, the UK, saw its tourism receipts fall by 16.7% in the first five months of this year. There are nearly 200,000 short-term rental units nationwide, up 10.2% from 2023, with a corresponding decline in the number of hotels! And this is a serious indicator that tourists have started to save money.

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