Athens braces for huge influx of Olympic visitors in two years’ time
New hotels, cruise ships and even private homes have been drafted into Athens’s bid to have enough rooms for the hundreds of thousands of tourists who will descend on the ancient city for the 2004 Olympics. However, Games officials, who next Tuesday (August 13) start the two-year countdown to the start of the event, are worried that there is still a major challenge ahead to meet the near-insatiable demand for accommodation. Games organizers Athens 2004 say that with rooms for the nearly 20,000-strong Olympic «family» of officials and guests now largely provided for, the focus has shifted to satisfying the demands of the ordinary tourist and sports fan. «We are very close to the target of between 18,000 and 19,000 hotel rooms for the Olympic family,» Basil Neiadas, general manager of Games Services, which is in charge of accommodation, told Reuters. The port of Piraeus, just on the outskirts of Athens, is in the middle of a facelift that will allow up to 15 cruise liners to berth, making more than 3,000 rooms available for people like sponsors, international sports federations and high-paying tourists. It was a tactic that was highly successful at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, which used its famed harbor as a stunning and popular backdrop. With most of the new and future Athens hotel rooms reserved for the Olympic family, Athenian residents have been pressed to open their homes to visitors. There are no hard estimates on how many tourists will visit Athens for the Games but Athens 2004 believes from 100,000 to 150,000 beds per day will be needed from when the Games start on August 13 to the August 29 closing ceremony. «But even this number could increase because a survey found there was a low number of people who know Athens is organizing the Games while a big number said it was too early to consider if they will come,» Neiadas said. Island-hopping Another complication is the tourist who might want to combine a Greek island and Games holiday, in which case they could stay outside Athens and visit Games events, he added. Anecdotal evidence suggests the supply of private homes will be more than enough to meet demand: An Athens 2004 poll showed about 25 percent of Athenians would consider renting out their homes during the Games. Athens 2004 officials think some homeowners willing to open their doors have unrealistic expectations of how much they will get from well-heeled tourists. The Games organizers, which have called a tender to choose companies to oversee the private home plan, has warned Greeks against any get-rich-quick ideas. Stratos Paradias, who heads a group of landlords lobbying the government for rents received during the Games to be tax-free, says expectations are high. «We know non-official visitors will be in houses because all the hotels have already been booked for the Olympic family. They must give incentives for people to rent their homes, otherwise people will resort to unlicensed agents,» he said. Accommodating out-of-town volunteers is another issue. «The number cannot be estimated. There are lots of volunteers from abroad. Some are Greeks from abroad not requesting accommodation,» said Neiadas. Scramble to renovate Existing Athens hotels are scrambling to renovate their buildings to make the 2004 deadline. The expectation of full occupancies has led to investments of 650 million euros ($632.9 million) in upgrading hotel accommodation with the result that now is not a good time to get a top room. Of the three main hotels bordering Athens’s central Syntagma Square, only one is open at present. The Athens Hilton, the city’s third largest, will be shut until December 2002 for a $60-million facelift and 64 new rooms. Apart from lifting a 14-year ban on building and expanding hotels in the congested Athens area, Greece plans to provide a one-off 3,000 euros ($2,921) per room incentive to lower-grade hotels to upgrade their facilities. «We’re talking about 100-percent occupancy for at least five months (leading up to August 2004). It’ll be a golden year for major hotel units,» said one hotelier. Once smoggy and disorganized, Athens has been losing out to the Greek islands for years. Almost three-quarters of tourist arrivals skip the capital for holiday spots such as Crete and the Aegean islands. The number of overnight stays by foreign tourists in the Athens area grew about 8.2 percent a year between 1965 and 1980 but fell 4 percent a year from 1980 to 1999, according to the Center for Planning and Economic Research. The rest of the country saw overnight stays in the period grow 3.2 percent annually. Athens city officials see the Games as their chance to halt the trend and set the city on the path to becoming a key location for the lucrative convention trade in Europe. «Athens’s convention market is relatively undeveloped and the city is currently one of the few modern capital cities lacking a major purpose-built convention center. A key objective of Athens’s Olympic bid is to spur the development of new convention facilities,» global real-estate investment firm Jones Lang LaSalle said in a recent report. «Athens is likely to have an additional stimulant to both room rates and performance growth, given the increase in quality room stock likely to enter the market around the time of the Olympics in 2004,» it said.
