Athens: Tourist industry officials and organisation are predicted that tourist flows to Greece from abroad will start to pick up significantly from late June or early July onward, the deputy president of the Greek hoteliers union Christina Tetradi told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency. She reported a “nonexistent” May and very few bookings in June, with most hotels having put off their opening until the middle of that month.
Roughly 10 percent of hotels have opened after the official start of the tourism season, Tetradi noted, with most waiting until the coast becomes clear with respect to Greece’s main markets, which are the UK, Germany, Russia and Scandinavian countries. Meanwhile, tour operators were pressing for ever lower prices and their flights were arriving with few passengers on board.
It was essential for Greece to become green on the ECDC map, she emphasised, saying this will be the deciding factor for the last-minute travellers. She highlighted June 7 as a key date, when the UK will announce whether Greece will go ‘green’ for Britons, meaning that they don’t have to quarantine on their return.
The season has also got off to a slow start on Rhodes, where only 25 of its 650 hotels are now open, while roughly a quarter are open in Heraklion on Crete.
According to Michalis Vamiedakis, founder of a hotel chain and the Deltanet Travel agency, another key factor would be avoiding bad developments on the pandemic front in October and November, when the flight planning for the following year is done and hoteliers and travel agents start negotiations for new contracts and bookings in 2022.
Mayors in smaller island destinations, meanwhile, reported a more hopeful picture and said that the fast vaccination on islands, combined with low cases, have generate confidence, with bookings coming from Greece, France, Germany and Italy, as well as Balkan markets, in July and August.