Mass tourism

Greece has had a record year when it comes to tourism. A whopping 32.7 million people visited Greece in the last 12 months. For the next 12 months a new record is projected.
Currently Greece doesn’t have a structural mass tourism problem. But in some places at certain moments in the year, thr infrastructure of those places has reached its limits.

Two of those are Santorini and Mykonos.

Mykonos is visited by party tourists almost all year long, and in July and August lots of cruises make stops on the island which brings oversaturation with it.
Santorini has a population of 15500 people, but gets visited by 3.3 million tourists per year. Lots of them are people from cruise ships, 800 ships per year. Which makes the situation very hard to live in.

So for these islands the Greek government decided to impose a tourist tax of 20 EUR per day for the tourists from the cruise ships. In hopes that this will stop the growth of the visiting cruise tourists. Maybe even drop the numbers.

Following Venice

Greece is not the first to impose such a tax, it all started in Venice last year, where they decided to ask all tourists a fee of 1 to 5 EUR per night they are staying, depending on the time of the year.
So far this hasn’t put a stop on the growth of tourists visiting Venice.

Which really brings up questions about the effect of such a taxation. It probably just sponsors the tax revenue from the country, but doesn’t hold tourists back…

Sincerely,

Pele23