Lured by glorious beaches, world-class archaeological sites and comforting cuisine, some 33 million people visited Greece in 2023, around five million more than in 2022. According to the Greek National TourisM Organisation (GNTO), 2023 was also a landmark year for cruising in Greece, with seven million passengers visiting the country aboard 5,230 cruise ships, compared to 4.38 million passengers and 4,614 cruise ships in 2022.
In an unprecedented step last month, however, the Greek ombudsman, an independent organisation created to combat maladministration and ensure the effective exercise of citizen’s rights, stressed the need to regulate tourism in a sustainable way, saying Greece must not “exhaust its potential, wasting it and making our tourist destinations unattractive over time”.
Reacting to the statement last week, Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis vowed to put a cap on cruise tourism – an industry that some say is being used as a scapegoat for wider issues of overtourism – by limiting the number of berths available to ships via a bidding process that vessels would need to use in order to secure the slots. Unlike Amsterdam, Venice and Barcelona, where restrictions have already been implemented, Greece has yet to introduce a daily limit on cruises to the country’s most popular destinations, but there are fears that capping the number of ships could have a negative effect on the tourist industry which accounts for a quarter of Greece’s economy.
With approximately 1.5m passengers in 2023, Piraeus, the port for Athens, tops the list of popular cruise destinations in Greece, followed by Santorini with 1.3m and Mykonos with almost 1.2m.
In Santorini, where overtourism has angered many locals, Kathrin of tour company Santorini Experts doesn’t agree that cruises are to blame for the island’s chronic overcrowding. She says: “I really don’t like the term ‘overtourism’ – it feels like we’re only calling it that because of the chaos that ensues when there are lots of cruise ships visiting at once. If we just had a different port that didn’t require cruise ship passengers to go through the whole tendering and cable car process, I believe half of our problems would vanish.”