Anastasia Balezdrova
Athens has been a tourist destination for many years. Few are the people on the planet who have not wished to visit and get closer to the art of ancient Greece at least once in their lives. Still in the first spring days the streets downtown were filled with the typical figures of tourists, holding maps in hand and trying to see all the typical sights of Athens.
How do the tourists see the Greek capital, however? GRReporter asked the opinion of Nikos Kelayditis, a board member of the Hellenic Association of Travel and Tourism Agencies (HATTA).
"Athens is a city that tourists like very much. All my customers from abroad are its fans. They say the city is clean, but I do not totally agree with this opinion."
One major problem in the centre of Athens is crime. Four hotels that were around the central Omonia Square closed in recent months, because the area is a haunt of illegal immigrants, drug addicts and pickpockets who send tourists away from there.
"The media made a lot of fuss about crime in the centre two years ago. Unfortunately, I can not say that there is any significant change. Partial measures were only taken that, however, led to only a temporary improvement.
On the other hand, I can not fully accept the statements that the guests of the hotels around Omonia are almost being beaten at the exit of the buildings. This does not mean that I deny the existence of accidents, but it happens everywhere, even in countries patterns of social behaviour such as Canada. But pick-pocketing has increased. About 20% of my customers became victims of such thefts, really."
According to Nikos, the problem of crime in the so-called "ghetto" in central Athens could be reduced by making the small streets walkways, through installing strong street lighting and continuous police patrolling.
"The other problem is that Athens is not advertised as a single tourist destination. It has great potential to offer its visitors not only a weekend (city break), but a lot more days. Here we have a wealth that we do not use even not in the least. With the exception of Monaco and Nice, Athens is the only European city the centre of which is very close to the sea, which is much cleaner than in the other two cities that I mentioned. But the tourists associate Athens only with the Acropolis because we do not do anything about it; for example, we could connect the centre with the promenade. And we could hold different events in the museums and with the various cultural foundations. We could organize, for example, weeks of the cinema, outdoor exhibitions or to turn the attention of visitors to the Greek poetry."
He believes that the relevant tourism authorities do not do everything they could to attract visitors in the country. "The Secretary of Tourism should travel around the world to promote the country. He should address the Greek Diaspora to enable these people to turn back to the homeland of their parents." The initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to organize various events each week in order to attract visitors with diverse interests is great, but not so well-organized according to the people from the tourism industry.
The protests and subsequent events in the countries of North Africa like Egypt and Tunisia, which are traditional tourist destinations, made Greece hope that the tourist flow to the country will increase. Some of the institutions engaged in tourism even said that a sharp increase in tourist flows is expected.
"At the end of the last tourist period, at the beginning of December 2010 an over-optimistic assessment was made that the surge in tourism will be over 20% in 2011. Some others even said that the percentage will exceed 30%. It is not unlikely to happen, but in very specific tourist locations such as certain islands.
I think the growth will not exceed 10%. This is shown by the preliminary bookings which were a few in February. Bookings were made in March too and they declined again in late April. But we can not exclude the possibility that companies would probably try to lower the prices.
Of course, things are very difficult because we have to fight the high prices, the economic crisis in Greece, the economic crisis in Europe and the world and the extremely high VAT on all tourist services. I exclude only the hotel prices from this list as their VAT has been reduced nearly by half and it is now 6.5%.
Compared to April 2010, there was a 22% drop in visits by foreign tourists in our company this year. The drop of tourists from Argentina is the most significant but we must consider that the country's economic situation is not very good yet. Moreover, according to our office in Buenos Aires, the number of tickets available for Europe was quite limited, while the prices were quite high.
But I think there was not a general decline for Greece. The flow of tourists for Easter was almost identical to last year’s. It could have been lower in some places and I say this because there were vacant rooms to the last minute, which never had happened before. I think the most affected were the regular destinations during Easter - Corfu, Santorini, Mykonos, Crete.
What impressed me the most this year was that the vessels were full on the way out and on the way back. My collaborators from other Cycladic islands told me that those were not traditional tourists who stay in a hotel. They were mostly Greeks, who came to spend the holiday with relatives."
Another problem for tourism is the particularly high cost of transport to tourist destinations.
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