Boutique hotels outperform
Luxury tourism keeps expanding, favoring well-maintained small accommodation units
Small, renovated and special accommodation complexes, also known as boutique hotels, are performing even better than large luxury hotels in terms of the growth rate of their occupancy.
This is also the reason for the significant investments that have been made in recent years in such small “well-maintained” units, both in Athens, where the available spaces are limited, and in the rest of the country, including the islands.
Most of these investments concern the renovation of pre-existing units while their management is often assigned to international companies that specialize in that segment of the market.
According to the data collected by Square Lime, a management company which boasts 40 boutique units throughout Greece (in Attica, Mani, Epirus, the Cyclades and Crete) in its portfolio, this particular segment of the market is heading for a new record in 2024.
For the country as a whole, bookings are moving upward following an exceptional 2023, in which such accommodation recorded a 14% increase in occupancy compared to the record year of 2019.
Bookings at boutique hotels and villas appear to have increased by 8% from the beginning of 2024 to date. That is, the bookings that have already been made for the whole of 2024, in relation to the corresponding bookings that were made in the same period last year for the whole of 2023, have increased more than the entire Greek market (+7.9% based on confirmed airline seat bookings).
Athens has seen a 10% increase in bookings in boutique hotels compared to last year; however, that is expected to accelerate due to last-minute bookings and also due to its emergence as a year-round destination.
In the Cyclades, the performance of bookings so far shows different “speeds” between the islands, with Naxos and Ios performing better, with 10% more bookings than last year. At the same time, however, the rate of bookings for Mykonos and Santorini, which declined last year, point to a further decrease of 7%.
