ECONOMY

Tourism spurt shows no sign of letting up

New signs are appearing almost every day indicating that Greek will keep growing next year, while data showed the highest rise in arrivals last month among rival destinations.

Besides pre-bookings from the British market – growing by over 10 percent year-on-year – German and Austrian tour operators have also expanded their programs for the Greek destination as they anticipate an increase in its popularity.

Civil Aviation Authority data show that Greece has continued its impressive upward course in October as far as foreign tourism arrivals are concerned. These expanded by 15.9 percent from October 2012 to reach 954,950. Meanwhile, arrivals in Spain grew by 6.9 percent, in Turkey by 11.5 percent and in Cyprus by 4.4 percent.

Even Athens is showing a notable increase, as arrivals to the country’s biggest airport showed a yearly increase of 12.7 percent last month after a decline of 11.1 percent in October 2012 and of 15.4 percent in the same month the year before that.

In the first 10 months of this year arrivals by air have shown annual growth of 8.8 percent, reaching 13.4 million at all of the country’s airports. The biggest increase came from the markets of Russia, the US and France.

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