Everyone who witnessed the pursuit of Nikos Maziotis in Monastiraki and downtown Athens may have noticed that the streets were busy. The tables at the restaurants were full of tourists and it is no coincidence that the two lightly-injured bystanders were from Australia and Germany.
The truth is that despite its many surprises, Athens is reliving days of glorious tourist past. In June the “Grande Bretange” achieved its best results since 2004, when the Olympic Games were on and ensured impressive results.
Without a doubt, tourists are returning to Athens and are creating a different atmosphere in the capital’s economy, which has nothing to do with the depressing days of 2011 and 2012. It is a similar case in other tourist areas in the country.
The messages in Milos, Paros, Naxos, Myconos, Rhodes, Kos, Crete, Halkidiki, Pieria, Pilio, the Ionian Islands and the Western Peloponnese are encouraging and suggest that tourist arrivals in Greece will be at an all-time high. This means that revenue will be higher and the financial impact will be greater.
The increased tourism will affect transports, flights and shipping, the food industry and trade, while also having a positive effect on the value of land and property in tourist areas. There is a chain of positive developments stemming from tourism that is anything but negligible.
Even the restriction of the “red loans” of hotel businesses demonstrated to all those demanding auctions and that quick divestitures that the economy is a complicated and multifaceted process that requires strength and stamina and which cannot of course by defined by obsessive reasoning and decisions that end up causing more harm than good.
It is interesting to see how this increased tourist wave to “ruined” Greece emerged. At first it was the huge events in North Africa; at first there was the unrest in Tunisia, followed by Egypt and the the war in Libya and Syria, then the perpetual Turkish crisis spread insecurity amongst tourists in North Africa and the Middle East, thus making Greece the safest tourist destination in the Southeaster Mediterranean.
By taking into consideration all of the above, along with the development of the Internet and social media’s ability to showcase to billions of potential customers world-wide the incredible sights and wonders of the islands and country side in Greece, Greek tourism is triumphing.
The way things go and so long as security isn’t affected, Greece may end up welcoming more than 50 million tourists each year, with ten million of them coming through Athens!
As we have said though, the Economy is a science unlike Physics, which can have its axioms and theorems tested and confirmed in a test tube or a lab. There are no test tubes or labs in the Economy. The conditions are never the same. That is why even the “brightest minds” fail in their predictions…
Antonis Karakousis
Originally published in the Sunday print edition
