ATHENS – Greece’s plans to limit overtourism in popular spots – while luring luxury resorts to attract more – will see a 20-euro ($22.11) tax on cruise ship visitors going to the Mykonos and Santorini, but it wasn’t said if there would be a cap on arrivals.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has opened the country to tourist development almost everywhere, said at the Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF) he recognizes the strain on infrastructure in places like the two islands.

Santorini saw as many as 17,000 cruise ship passengers a day landing on the island this summer, further overwhelming its resources and buckling the water supply, the main sites of Oia and Fira being standing room only.

The island has only about 16,000 permanent residents but could get 4 million tourists this year – four years after businesses practically begged people to come when the COVID-19 pandemic struck and kept them away.

But despite the complaints, Mitsotakis insisted that, “Greece does not have a structural overtourism problem… Some of its destinations have a significant issue during certain weeks or months of the year, which we need to deal with.”

He said that, “Cruise shipping has burdened Santorini and Mykonos and this is why we are proceeding with interventions,” he added, with Santorini Mayor Nikos Zorzos wanting limits on how many ships can anchor off island.

Mitsotakis said that only part of the new tax revenues would go to the islands to be invested in infrastructure but didn’t say how much nor where the rest of the money would go or if development would be limited too.

The government plans to regulate the number of cruise ships that arrive simultaneously at certain destinations, while rules to protect the environment and tackle water shortages will be imposed on islands, he said, reported Reuters.

The rules aim to reduce the strain that the vacation industry places on communities and echo a pushback against overtourism in several other major European destinations, said The New York Times in a review of the plan.

“Tourism supports the economy with significant resources and jobs, but it has its own particular social impact,” Mitsotakis said, adding that he was “very concerned about the image on some of our islands some months of the year due to cruise ships.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/world/europe/greece-cruise-ships-tourists-islands.html

It’s a balancing act for Greece because tourism is the country’s biggest revenue engine and 2024 is on a path to break 2023’s record and see more than 31 million visitors spending more than 20 billion euros ($22.1 billion,) with numbers up 15 percent in the first half.

UP ANCHOR

Another problem is that foreign investors acquiring Golden Visas that come with residency permits and passports for themselves and their families have turned property they bought in order to qualify into short-term rentals, drying up the supply and spiking costs.

Islands have also been overwhelmed with villas and swimming pools and Mykonos is in the hands of the underworld and developers, critics have said, violence used against people trying to stop it and officials said looking the other way.

“We’ve had yet another extremely successful tourism year,” Mitsotakis said, noting that the sector was going “from record to record,” the cruise ship passenger tax for Santorini being raised from the current 35 cents.

The government will also increase a lodging tax paid by hotels and rental accommodations on the islands, with those proceeds going toward local communities to help them during the peak season, Mitsotakis said.

Property owners who offer long-term leases, rather than the short-term rentals generally given to international visitors, will be exempt from paying rental tax for three years, he said, in a bid to increase the housing supply and hold down rents and home prices.

He said that he would soon deliver plans on rampant construction on the most overdeveloped islands that have been super-saturated with luxury accommodations and villas and taking over public beaches.

“Let’s take action and put the brakes, wherever needed, on islands where we believe that the situation has reached a point that the infrastructure is essentially being tested,” he told reporters without giving details.

With the Chinese management firm COSCO renovating the port of Piraeus into a major cruise ship venue, the industry is soaring in arrivals in Greece, an expected 20 percent increase in arrivals in 2024 bringing waves of tourists.

Giorgos Koubenas, the President of Greece’s union of cruise-ship owners, said revenues this year for the industry could hit 2 billion euros ($2.21 billion) in 2024 with most passengers wanting to go to Santorini, which got 1.3 million in 2023.

Zorzos told the paper that officials tried to keep the number of cruise ship arrivals to 8,000 daily but without a limit on how many could come that it wasn’t manageable. “It’s important that each island has the ability to regulate the situation locally,” he said.

He added that local authorities should “ have control in such significant issues that directly influence the daily lives of residents,” but the state – which wants to bring in as much money as possible – has the authority over the islands.

Konstantinos Revinthis, the Mayor of Serifos, said he was persuaded to oppose cruise visits after a medium-size liner brought some 2,000 passengers to his island of roughly 1,000. “We don’t have the infrastructure to host so many people,” he said.