New Year New Expectations

Outlook Positive for Greek Tourism in 2021, Experts Say

Crete weather in september

 

Holidays in Crete

Latest travel news: Direct flights to Greece to resume on July 15

Greece will permit direct flights from Britain to resume on July 15, a Greek government spokesman has confirmed.

Stelios Petsas said: “In cooperation with the British government, and following advice of experts, the government announces the resumption of direct flights from the United Kingdom to all airports of the country from July 15.”

Greece is exempt from the FCO advice against non-essential international travel, but a ban on non-stop flights was recently extended, making holidays more difficult. Now airlines will be able to restart services, just in time for summer.

Across Western Europe, airlines increased capacity to 6.8m passengers last week, up 47 per cent, with Ryanair alone offering 763,938 seats, up from 218,484 over the previous seven days.

However, Britons hoping for a last-minute summer holiday have had their options significantly curtailed. Of the 74 destinations to which the FCO has given the green light, only 25 do not have restrictions on UK arrivals. Malta, for example, currently requires all British visitors to self-isolate for 14 days, while Cyprus, another Mediterranean favourite, is still refusing entry to all UK travellers.

The Fortress of Koules in Heraklion Crete

The Venetian Castle of Heraklion is called Koules, which means fortress in Turkish. It is an impressive fortress that surrounds the harbor of Heraklion, Crete. The Koules Castle is a massive fortress with two storeys that used to guard the entry to the port. The Castle was constructed by the Venetians in the early 13th century when they conquered the town. The earliest description of the Koules Venetian Castle exists in the work of the Florentine monk Cristoforo Buondelmonti in 1429.

The Fortress was primarily built for the storage of the foodstuff and the military supplies. It also served as the quarter for the officers and as a prison. A devastating earthquake completely destroyed the Castle in 1303 and it was rebuilt by the Genoese. The fortress was again restored during 1523-1540 and got its ultimate form. During the Ottoman rule, the Castle was again transformed to a prison. Several Cretan heroes who revolted against the Ottomans had been imprisoned in the castle and had been killed in the dark dungeons.

The architecture of the Castle is the typical Venetian architectural style. The construction was such that the walls of the Castle could protect the breakwater of the harbor. The Castle was made of stones. The ground floor has a vaulted roof with broad fanlight. The walls were very thick and were divided into 26 apartments serving as the residence of Kastelanos, the officer responsible for the well-being of the castle, as well as the dwellings of the captains and other officers.

A part of the ground floor was also used as the storeroom. There were three carvings of the Lion of Saint Mark in the Castle. The one at the seaside of the castle exists to these days. The upper floor and the basis of a minaret were added in the original construction by the Ottomans. Today the Koules Venetian Castle has been cleaned and restored many times. It is visited by thousands of people every year and consists of the trademark of Heraklion Town.

Greece reveals health protocols for flights and hotels in summer 2020

Tourism Minister, Haris Theoharis, revealed the health protocols for flights and hotels Greece plans to implement during the tourism season in summer 2020, once the country opens its borders to tourists amid the pandemic.

Speaking at an online event of the youth organization of ruling New Democracy, Theoharis stressed that the pandemic makes the setting of rules for the tourists’ arrivals necessary and that these health protocols must be respected.

He said that the health protocols have been prepared in collaboration with the Infectious Diseases Commission of the Greek National Health Organization EODY.

These protocols have already been submitted to tourism agencies for consultation and submission of proposals on their side, the Minister added.

Flights

In order for a passenger to board a flight from abroad to Greece, he must have received a health certificate within the last 72 hours that he is not a carrier of COVID-19.  Without this certificate, he will not be allowed to board.

There will be no vacant seats on flights to, from or within Greece, ie their capacity will be full so that air transport is economically viable.

Passengers will not be served food for flights for up to four hours, but only packaged snacks.

Greeks who want to travel abroad should also be tested 72 hours before boarding the plane.

Greece’s request is that no COVID-19 test be conducted when tourists leave Greece. Tourists should be tested when they return to their own countries.

Tourists will leave the country without any control, so that there will be no risk of being trapped in the country and stay in quarantine. “After all, this would be a disincentive to choosing our country as a holiday destination,” the minister said.

Hotels

“Quarantine hotels” in every tourist area

The Ministry of Tourism will rent a tourist accommodation in each tourist area of ​​the country which will function as a “quarantine hotel.” Tourists who are found to be carriers of the coronavirus will be transferred there.

Each hotel or tourist accommodation will be obliged to contract with a doctor, who will determine whether a tourist must undergo a COVID-19 test. The diagnosis will be either live or via telemedicine.

The test results will be released within six hours so that anyone who is tested positive can be transferred to “quarantine hotels”.

Special training  in hygiene rules will be provided to the staff of each hotel.

There will be no buffets in the hotels, except in small hotels.

Sunbeds will be installed at a safety distance to each other and will have a disposable cover for each swimmer.

Revenues, bilateral agreements

Regarding the revenues from tourism, Theoharis said that last year revenues were 18 billion euros. “This year we will have at most 8 billion euros,” the minister said.

He announced bilateral agreements with countries such as Bulgaria, Israel, Cyprus, for the free passage and return of Greek tourists.

How Greece is beating coronavirus despite a decade of debt

Every day at 6pm Greeks turn on their TV sets and tune into a broadcast that at other times they might have missed. Like most rituals, there are no surprises: each time they encounter the same scene, two men, seated several meters apart, behind a long table in a brightly lit room.

The health ministry’s daily coronavirus briefing then begins with Sotiris Tsiodras, a soft-spoken Harvard-trained professor of infectious diseases, delivering the latest facts and figures with the occasional emotional plea. Nikos Hardalias, the civil defence minister, invariably follows, invoking the gravity of the situation with warnings that Greeks “must stay at home”.

The bookish professor and no-nonsense former mayor are the faces who have come to be associated with the government’s drive to contain the spread of Covid-19. Their efforts at keeping the country virus-safe appear to be paying off: in a population of just over 11 million, there were, as of Monday, 2,145 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 99 fatalities, far lower than elsewhere in Europe. Italy to date has registered 20,465 deaths.

Greece, it is generally agreed, is having a better crisis than may have been expected. Tsiodras recently allowed himself to speak of “a flattening of the curve” even if authorities accept that the prospect of Orthodox Easter, on 19 April, is unlikely to be without challenge. Traditionally, Greeks flock to ancestral villages in the countryside to celebrate the biggest festival in their religious calendar.

The country’s ability to cope with a public health emergency of such proportions was not a given. After almost a decade embroiled in debt crisis – years in which its economy contracted by 26% – Greece’s health system has far from recovered.

State hospitals bore the brunt of cuts demanded in return for rescue loans from international lenders to keep the nation afloat and in the euro zone. With the epidemic’s arrival in Europe, officials were forced to acknowledge, 18 months after the country exited its third bailout, that it had only 560 intensive care unit (ICU) beds.

It was a stark reality that left no room for mitigation strategy, or contemplating policies of achieving “herd immunity”.

Greece, like Italy, also has a large elderly population, with about a quarter of pensionable age. “There were realities, weaknesses, that we were very aware of,” said Dr Andreas Mentis who heads the Hellenic Pasteur Institute. “Before the first case was diagnosed, we had started examining people and isolating them. Incoming flights, especially from China, were monitored. Later, when others began to be repatriated from Spain, for example, we made sure they were quarantined in hotels.”

Mentis sits on the scientific committee that advises the centre-right government on the deadly disease. What is increasingly being seen as textbook crisis management, even by political foes, has been attributed as much to prioritising science over politics as to a managerial approach that focused on what the 51-year-old prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has described as “state-sensitivity, co-ordination, resolve and swiftness”.

Alex Patelis, Mitsotakis’ economics adviser, said: “There are problems you can solve through spin and others that require truth and transparency. It was very clear we needed experts and we needed to listen to them. That said, Greeks have been through crisis; they know what it is. I think that also enabled them to adapt and be stoic.”

From the outset the 25-strong committee pushed for the socially disruptive choice of lock down, a devastating option for a country that had only just begun to show signs of economic rejuvenation.