by Donald Wood
Last updated: 9:05 AM ET, Wed July 10, 2024
Officials in Greece
believe that overtourism and its impact on local communities has become a major
problem in its current form and is not sustainable.
According to Fortune.com,
Athens Mayor Harris Doukas said that tourists visiting the city are
contributing just “€0.40” to the local economy. To justify the 120 percent growth
of international visitors to Greece since 2019, Doukas and other officials said
the government needs to make tourism more fiscally viable.
The nation is still dependent on tourism, as the gross
domestic product (GDP) derives 25-30 percent from travel-related industries. In
total, 33 million tourists visited Greece last year, putting a strain on “infrastructure,
housing and environmental resources.”
“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,” a government
report claimed.
To combat overtourism, Greece added a climate
crisis resilience tax to the hotel bills of international visitors designed
to help address the devastation of recent natural disasters that impacted the country.
“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,” Greece Economy Minister Kostis Hatzidakis
said.
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