Almost a million tourists are expected in the first week of August

her Vicky Kurlibini

Arrivals from abroad are booming and the numbers from seat planning on international flights are now impressive.

According to data included in INSET’s Recovery tracker, only in the first week of August the seats on incoming international flights amount to 973 thousand, the highest number since the beginning of this season.

Throughout July, the planning of seats from abroad was at an all-time high. 947 thousand were the positions in the second week of the month, 954 thousand in the current week and another 961 thousand positions in the following week.

The UK, Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria lead the main foreign markets. Followed by Belgium, Israel, Poland, Cyprus and the US market.

The busiest airports, after Athens, are Heraklion, Rhodes, Corfu, Thessaloniki, Kos, Chania, Santorini and Mykonos.

High performance

Also impressive are the figures from four very popular islands for air traffic in the first ten days of July.

According to the South Aegean Tourism Initiative and the official data from FraportRhodes, Kos, Mykonos, Santorini record tourist flow records:

Rhodes more than doubled the growth rate recorded during the first months of the season to 18% with 173,205 passengers, compared to 146,605 in the first ten days of July 2019.

The increase compared to 2019, which was the record year for Greek tourism, reaches 13% in Kos, where 83,667 tourists arrived in just ten days, from 73,766 the year before the pandemic.

Mykonos was visited by 49,713 tourists from abroad, 37% more than in the corresponding period of 2019 (36,281). Finally, Santorini experienced an explosion of tourist flows, which more than doubled the 2019 record and achieved an increase of 62% in July with 58,071 visitors compared to 35,799 in the first ten days of July for 2019.

How was June?

The passenger traffic of Fraport Greece’s 14 regional airports reached 4.61 million in June, compared to 4.46 million in the corresponding month of 2019. International traffic increased by 4.6%, to 3.93 million passengers, while on the contrary domestic traffic decreased by 3.5%, to 0.68 million passengers.

In the first half of the year, Fraport Greece’s airports handled 10.3 million passengers, compared to 10.92 million in the corresponding period of 2019, marking a drop of only 5.7%, showing the closing of the “scissors” in relation to 2019.

International traffic decreased by 1.4%, to 7.72 million passengers and domestic traffic decreased by 16.8%, to 2.57 million passengers.