The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Greek Tourism-Updates and Comparisons

Abstract

This paper updates and compares the results obtained in Papanikos’ (2020a) paper published in the Athens Journal of Tourism, which estimated the impact of the current pandemic on international Greek tourism receipts and tourist arrivals. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have negative effects on Greek tourism and the Greek economy. In this paper, newly released data by the Bank of Greece for the entire 2021 period are used to assess the impact on Greek tourism during the two pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. In addition, the actual data from 2020 are compared with the estimates of the three scenarios made in the 2020 paper. One conclusion that emerges from the analysis of the data on international tourism is that in 2021 Greek tourism did much better than in 2020, but still is far away from the record year of 2019. In 2021, international tourist arrivals and international tourism receipts accounted for 48% and 58% of the 2019 values respectively. Keywords: pandemic, COVID-19, crisis, tourism, Greece, economic impact