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Published on : Tuesday, January 5, 2021
The tourism sector of Greece is hoped to get better next summer after experiencing a dramatic drop in revenues because of the pandemic in 2020, a senior industry official said on Tuesday.
The tourism is the key driver for the economy of Greece, accounting for 20% of its output and creating job opportunities for one in five workers.
How tourism fares is tremendously important for Greece which came out from its third international bailout in 2018 after going through a decade-long debt crisis.
Yannis Retsos, head of the tourism confederation (SETE) of the country said that tourism revenues this year had reached 4 billion euros. It’s a drop from 18 billion in 2019, as a result of the global travel restrictions to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Greece is hoping its economy to get smaller in size by about 10 percent this year and is hoping that the second half of 2021 will experience an economic recovery.
“We need to wait for the second half of the year to see some sort of action in tourism,” Retsos told a Greek radio station.
“Anything we see from May on would be a very positive surprise,” he said.
On basis of the recent official data from the Bank of Greece, tourism arrivals dropped 76% in the January-to-October period. The country has reported 135,931 infections since it documented its first case in February and 4,672 deaths.
The country has been in a nationwide lockdown since early November and allowed only hair salons and bookstores to reopen for the Christmas season.
Tags: Greece tourism