The pretty European city insisting tourists only contribute 41p each to its economy | World | News

The Mayor of Athens has revealed the current tourism model is “unsustainable” claiming each visitor contributes under 50p per visit. The capital city of Greece, Harris Doukas, is among authorities sharing concerns about overburdening crowds.

In an attempt to control this, the city capped the number of tourists who could visit the Acropolis to 20,000 last year. 

The number of visitors to Greece has exploded, growing by 120 percent between 2019 and 2023. However, tourism plays a huge part in the country’s economy – between 25 and 30 percent of its GDP.

On the island of Santorini, this number soars to 90 percent. This leaves the country in a dilemma of how much to crack down on overcrowding. 

“Each visitor brings €0.40 to the city, and we haven’t seen this money yet,” Doukas told Euronews. “We need to find a way to make tourism viable.” 

He also said that excessive visitors are having an impact on local communities. In April, residents in Athens took to the streets to “mourn the death” of neighbourhoods, partaking in activities including vandalism and arson. 

Many Greeks are forced to move out of the city as real estate companies turn their homes into Airbnbs for tourists. Short-term holiday rentals have surged by 500 percent in less than a decade.

At one rally, protesters chanted: “They are taking our houses while they live in the Maldives.” 

In 2023, 33 million tourists visited Greece, three times the country’s population and making it the tenth most visited country in the world, according to Visual Capitalist. While tourism brings economic benefits to local businesses, it has also put a disproportionate strain on infrastructure, housing and environmental resources, argued Fortune. 

“It turns out that the pressures exerted by tourism on the environment are linked to the change of land uses [due to the creation of new infrastructure and other facilities for tourist use], and specifically with the expansion of the urban environment at the expense of the natural,” said a government report which looking into sustainable tourism, as part of a broader effort to change Greece’s tourism model.   

Earlier this year, the country decided to introduce a new tourist tax for overnight visitors, replacing the previous hotel tax. Instead, visitors pay a “climate crisis resilience fee”, which varies depending on the accommodation and the time of year. The aim of the tax is to raise funds that can help address natural disasters. 

Other initiatives to manage Greece’s visitors include introducing fines for businesses which take up too much space on beaches with their sunbeds and umbrellas. 

“Our goal is to protect both the environment and the right of citizens to access the beach freely, and to preserve our tourism product as well as healthy entrepreneurship,” Economy Minister Kostis Hatzidakis said in a statement, according to Agence France-Presse.

Yet, Greece is not the only country struggling to control its crowd levels. In Amsterdam, plans have been made to limit cruise ship dockings in its harbour. In the badly affected Venice, an entry fee of £4.29 for day tippers has been introduced, raking in nearly one million in the first 11 days.