Tourism takings seen at €19 bln

Tourism professionals expect this year’s travel receipts to end up 5% higher than in record year 2019, per the president of the Greek Tourism Confederation (SETE), Yiannis Retsos.

He estimates that tourism takings from abroad throughout 2022 will range around €18.9-19 billion, against €18.2 billion in 2019. He expressed this forecast in the context of the Circle of Ideas conference “Greece After VI: National Strategy and International Spin.”

According to what sources have told Kathimerini and the data available so far on the evolution of arrivals from abroad and the increase in average per capita expenditure per trip, the forecast is for €18.9 billion, with a small margin of surprise for the better.

Addressing the same audience, Retsos admitted that macroeconomic and geopolitical data are leading to concerns about the coming year. But he emphasized that “we are now among the five most important tourism brands worldwide and this means that in the main target markets – especially European ones – Greece ranks between first and third in terms of citizens’ desire to visit.”

“Suppose that next year we have a smaller pool of visitors, because of what may happen as a result of inflation, increased energy costs etc, Greece will still be one of the top three choices. That makes us optimistic,” he added.

Referring to the issue of sustainability, he pointed out that before the pandemic “we were talking a lot at SETE about the need to manage destinations. It is something very important, so that a destination is not only good for its visitors, but above all it is good for the people who live there, because that is the only way it can be good for its visitors too.”

He explained that “when we talk about destination management, we talk about a lot of things. However, the most important thing of all is to see from now on how we improve the infrastructures of our destinations, infrastructures that have nothing to do only with what we call the heavy infrastructure of the destinations, but also with the utility networks, garbage management, the adequacy of water and sewage systems,” he said.