ATHENS – Victims of their own success – and price gouging – Greece’s most popular islands Santorini and Mykonos that have been overrun are seeing a drop in business for accommodations and catering, falling 10 percent while across the country there was an 8.71 percent hike.

Mykonos especially has become a kind of hedonistic hot spot for celebrities, the rich and young people and seen some places charge as much as 1,000 euros ($1100) for a bottle of champagne and profiteering in restaurants bilking the unsuspecting.

The island also is being investigated for the Greek mob controlling development in the wake of an architect being beaten nearly to death and an engineer shot dead, both in Athens, and runaway construction of luxury accommodations largely unchecked.

Santorini has gotten as many as 17,000 cruise ship arrivals in one day and could get 4 million tourists this year on an island with a year-round population of less than 16,000, driving up prices for apartments and homes and pricing out tourism workers.

Those two islands suffered the most but Magnesia, in the tourist-popular area of Magnesia also registered a drop in business activity in the sector, the region also having been hard hit by deadly floods in 2023.

Turnover in accommodation fell 4.6 percent there during the second quarter (April-June) and 6.5% percent in catering compared to the same period in 2023 as visitors are becoming more discerning in picking out where they want to go.

That has seen more going to the already popular islands of Crete, Corfu and Kefalonia and now also Chios and Lesbos, which host refugee detention camps, and are near the coast of Turkey, and benefiting from more Turkish tourists upset with high prices there.

Data from the Hellenic Statistics Authority showed turnover for hotels and resorts bringing in 2.81 billion euros ($3.09 billion) in the second quarter, up 10.7 percent.

For catering and eateries it amounted to 2.55 billion euros ($2.8 billion) which was an increase of 5.8 percent. For the first six months of 2024 it was 3.25 billion euros ($3.57 billion,) up 11 percent from 2023.

In the first half, revenues from accommodations and the food business on Mykonos dropped 9.84 percent, a loss of 13 million euros ($14.29 million,) seeming to indicate that the island’s reputation for being costly and overrun is driving people away.

Total turnover on Mykonos was 322.83 million euros ($354.92 million) in 2023, down from 364.53 million euros ($400.07 million) in 2022 while for Santorini it was 527.11 million euros ($579.51 million) in 2023 compared to 538.71 million euros ($592.26 million) in 2022, a loss of 11.6 million euros ($12.75 million) in revenues.