Tourism Minister Elena Kountoura has been nominated in the WTTC Global Champion Awards for successful tourism and destination management strategy. The award ceremony will take place in the framework of the World Tourism & Travel Council (WTTC) World Conference in Seville. The WTTC Global Champion Awards are given each year by the WTTC, representing the global travel industry, as recognition for tourism ministers or representatives of states for their work and initiatives in tourism.

At the World Conference, where former US President Barack Obama is scheduled to attend and talk, Kountoura will present the successes of Greek tourism and the country’s tourism strategy to major stakeholders and decision makers of the global travel industry, noting that this has led to outstanding performance in both 2018 and the last four years. She is expected to refer to the added value of tourism in national economies, its decisive and ever increasing contribution to the GDP of countries and employment, and the internationally recognised tourism strategy of Greece.

Recently, in its Annual Review on Greece, the WTTC announced that the boom in the Greek tourism industry far outstrips all European average growth rates. A characteristic of its great success is that in 2018, the tourism sector in Greece grew by 6.9 pct, achieving a growth rate that was 3.5 times higher than the growth rate of the Greek economy as a whole, which was 2.0 pct, but also of the European growth rate, which stood at 2.4 pct. Tourism accounts for 20.6 pct of Greece’s GDP, which means that more than 37.5 billion euros were invested in the Greek economy in 2018.