Greece Welcomes Over 2 Million Tourists in May

Photo source: Municipality of Athens / Thomas Gravanis

Bank of Greece figures on Friday showed that foreign arrivals to Greece in May were up by 672.5 percent year-on-year to 2.205 million.

More specifically, traveller flows through Greek airports increased by 818.1 percent year-on-year, as did traveller flows through road border-crossing points, by 431.1 percent.

This overall increase was due to higher traveller flows from both within the EU27 (up by 547.6 percent) and outside the EU27 (up by 996.5 percent). In greater detail, the number of travellers from within the euro area rose by 609.1 percent to 1.071 million.

Indicatively, the Bank of Greece said the number of travellers from Germany increased by 693 percent to 437.1 thousand and travellers from France increased by 412.4 percent to 159.0 thousand.

More travelers also from non-euro area

The data also showed that travellers to Greece from non-euro area EU27 countries increased by 378.1 percent to 262.2 thousand in May.

Indicatively, the number of travellers from the United Kingdom rose considerably to 410.8 thousand, as well as from the United States, which stood at 94.8 thousand.

May tourism revenue up by 536.4%

With the increase of arrivals in May, travel receipts were 536.4 percent higher compared to the corresponding month of 2021, according to the data.

January-May arrivals almost 4.4 million

With regard to Greece’s tourism performance in the five first months of the year, the number of inbound travellers to the country rose by 552.9 percent to 4.333 million up from 663.8 thousand visitors in the corresponding period of 2021.

The data on the tourism revenue that Greece generated during January‑May 2022 showed that travel receipts were up by 547.9 percent.

Comparing 2022 with 2019, the last year before the pandemic

Compared with the respective periods of 2019, inbound traveller flows to Greece in May 2022 decreased by 7.6 while arrivals were down by 18.3 percent in January-May 2022.

Travel receipts were down by 9.7 percent in May 2022 and fell by 12.2 percent in January‑May 2022, compared with the same periods of 2019.