The new Greek tourism promotion campaign for 2016 will focus on attaining a “12-months-a-year season” and will unfold in the coming months of January and February, Deputy Tourism Minister Elena Kountoura announced during the opening of the WTM exhibition in London, yesterday.
“The national policy for tourism is simple: we want to prolong the season”, Ms Kountoura underlined during a networking event of the Greek National Tourism Organization (GNTO) and added that Greece will also target to different types of tourism, such as medical and religious tourism, to attract more visitors throughout the year.
Thematic forms of tourism
“To accomplish this, we definitely need the regions with us and the contribution of the locals to open up new markets and develop and promote thematic forms of tourism. Tourism businesses also have high expectations from city break tourism in Athens and Thessaloniki. If things go well and according to schedule, I believe that Greece can be among the five most popular worldwide destinations”, Ms. Kountoura predicted.
She confirmed that Greece’s tourism industry expects 2015 to be another record year with arrivals reaching 26 million and revenue of 14.5 billion euros despite the negative publicity on economic developments since the beginning of the year and the immigrant crisis in the Greek islands
Back to normalcy
The Deputy Minister stressed that Greece’s traditional markets, such as the British, showed remarkable resilience and expressed her gratitude: “The British are great people with a big heart and love Greece, history and culture and we have a very good relationship. On the islands, the refugee problem peaked for 2 or 3 weeks, but it has now been resolved and everything has returned back to normalcy“, she added reassuringly.
Ms. Kountoura revealed that the first indicators for 2016 bookings, until September, record an annual increase of 4% and she appraised that Athens will be especially upbeat since six new boutique and luxury hotels and four hiking tours will enable travelers to sufficiently explore and appreciate the city.
Limited impact
On their behalf, Sunvil and TUI tour operators, said that they recorded a limited impact on reservations due to concerns over developments in the Greek economy, but have witnessed no wave of cancellations whatsoever.
The president of Athens – Attica & Argosaronic Hotel Association Alexandros Vassilikos, said for his part that “the crisis has led to cooperation between the public and private sectors to achieve synergies and to develop new campaigns and products in order to make the country even more attractive to tourists“.
