According to the latest reports prepared by STR Global, hotels in Athens had a very successful year in 2013, and, thus, managed to show a significant improvement of performance.
Hotels in Greece posted good results after the 2004 Olympic Games, and the trend persisted till the end of 2008, when local hotels experienced significant drop of occupancy and average daily rate. In 2008, prolonged social unrest turned many tourists away from hotels in Greece and in Athens in particular. The demand declined for the city, but for the whole year of 2013 there was an upward trend, and experts expect it to continue in future. If the trend persists, the tourism sector of the country is expected to recover, especially thanks to leisure tourism.
The economic crisis of 2008 and social unrest that followed it meant a significant loss for tourism industry of the country. According to experts, Greek hotels lost EUR2.5 billion in the period from 2010 to 2013, and Athens hotels lost approximately EUR250 million. However, starting from spring 2013 negative headlines started disappearing from Greek newspapers, and tourism in the country showed signs of recovery starting from May 2013. First two months of 2014 brought even greater results with growing number of international tourist arrivals, improved occupancy and stabilizing room rates. That is particularly true for hotels in Athens, where returning conference and business visitors helped to improve performance of local hotels. The city seems to be ready for the growing demand and offers many options for leisure and business visitors. Leisure travellers helped increasing occupancy level in 2013 as it added 7% to 56.8% in total comparing to 2012. This helped boost revenue level RevPAR added 7.9% to EUR53.9.