A Greek Column: ‘The Talk of the Town’ Is the Americans, Tourism Chief Says

ATHENS — “The talk of the town now in Greece and especially in Athens is the hundreds of thousands of American tourists we have,” Greece’s energetic minister of tourism, Vassilis Kikilias, tells me in his airy office above busy Syntagma Square, almost diagonally across from the 19th-century Hellenic Parliament building. He could be correct literally as well as numerically. The tall 48-year-old minister, a former professional basketball player in Greece, holds a key portfolio in the administration of Prime Minister Mitsotakis, tourism being something of a heavy industry in this country. While walking to meet him on a hot, sunny day, this correspondent heard more English in the streets than Greek. Those many thousands of Yankees aren’t all here at once, of course, but thanks to a record number of nonstop flights to Athens from America and diminishing availability on some of them, particularly in August, they very likely will have been by the time Greece’s long summer tourism season winds down. That could happen as late as November, and it represents a robust comeback after two years in which tourism arrivals and the receipts that go along with them plummeted due to the coronavirus pandemic, even though Greece navigated the crisis very capably compared with many other countries. Just ask Mr. Kikilias: Prior to heading up Greek tourism, he served as the country’s health minister. That was between July 2019 and August 2021, a timeframe that spanned the height of the pandemic in Greece, with many lockdowns and not a lot of merriment.Like crisis, pandemic is a word of Greek origin, of course, and amid the perils of each, new opportunities arose. “We demonstrated that we are a safe destination and I think the no. 1 reason for people to travel and fly nowadays is health protocols and security in general, and this helped us rebrand the country,” Mr. Kililias said, adding that “now we are getting positive feedback in the tourism sector, which is a big part of our economy, accounting for 25 percent of our GDP. This is added value from Greece’s successful management of the health crisis.”All those flights — 63 per week, at last count — are boosting the effort. “It’s a real comeback and part of a strategy that we undertook together with the American authorities in order to be able to link again, directly, Greece with the United States,” the minister said. In Athens, the teeming capital of Greece, there is a buzz around the city’s myriad historical sights, cultural attractions, and restaurants that has not been felt since the days before the Covid crisis emerged in March 2020. Celebrities and A-listers are back; last week, Bill Gates breezed into town for a short stay at a luxury Athenian hotel before heading off to the Greek islands. This raises a question: If you don’t have a yacht to your name or a cruise ship to board, where should you go after you’ve gawked at the Acropolis and tossed back the ouzo until 2 a.m. in a taverna or trendy restaurant?Thanks to the resurgence of international travel, some of Greece’s more iconic spots, like Mykonos and Santorini and to lesser extent the much larger island of Crete, can be expected to draw big tourist crowds as the days grow longer. Mr. Kikilias is not concerned, however, with the mostly pre-pandemic phenomenon of overtourism. Rather, he is a proponent of exploring some of Greece’s “beautiful but perhaps lesser-known destinations.”He spoke glowingly of Epirus, the rugged region in northern Greece that he says was until a few years ago the poorest region in Europe, but is now a veritable “diamond of Greek tourism.” Cities there, like Ioannina and Metsovo, coupled with “the unbelievable scenery, beautiful gastronomy, mountain and ski resorts, and Byzantine history,” make Epirus “an example of how you can turn around a destination and create tourism opportunities.”If many outside of Greece have not heard of Epirus, it may be because the historic area has not thus far had a Hollywood moment. “It can take something to spark interest,” Mr. Kikilias said, citing the island of Rhodes in the eastern Aegean Sea. “For Rhodes it was the ‘The Guns of Navarone,’” the 1961 movie starring Anthony Quinn and Gregory Peck, and “for Mykonos it was the rock stars and the gay community, back in the ’60s,” he said. “Now the Greek National Tourism Organization is working on promoting winter and mountain destinations, to shed the light on other islands, on the mainland in northern Greece and Thessaloniki, southern Greece and the Peloponnese … and this creates a momentum.”In the Peloponnese, Mr. Kikilias says, “you have in the south Kalamata, Messenia, Kardamyli, Laconi (the home of ancient Sparta), Mani, Gytheio, the fortress island of Monemvasia … and even the other part, starting from Patra down to Kourouta, with unbelievable sandy beaches and beautiful resorts and it’s all still relatively undiscovered.” Of Americans travelers, Mr. Kikilias said that “they have high standards and they tend to stay in the country longer than other tourists, because if you cross the Atlantic probably it will be for more than just a couple of days.” There is much to breathe in — again, literally. As of this week, Americans and everyone else out and about in Athens can enter all indoor areas without a mask. After almost two years of Covid-19, they are no longer mandatory barring certain exceptions, such as buses, the metro, and health care facilities.With more than 8,000 miles of coastline and hundreds of islands in the Greek archipelago, there is plenty to keep both first-time visitors and repeat travelers busy and Instagram-happy. Difficult as it can be to break away from Athens, which despite its noise and pollution rocks a Manhattan-like intensity, with all that implies, it is generally worth it — and even closer to the capital than famous isles like Mykonos are some stunning spots such as the islands of Hydra and Spetses and, as Mr. Kikilias sagely proffered, the Peloponnese. It is not only a beautiful but also big place, that mythic peninsula, and as this correspondent’s seriously empty gas tank can attest, well, it needs another column.

A Greek Column: ‘The Talk of the Town’ Is the Americans, Tourism Chief Says

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