Greek Tourism: A Story of Success

This chapter critically explores the trajectory of Greek tourism and its main quantitative and qualitative features, in an effort to sketch its development and distinctive aspects – both positive and negative – in the broader context of global tourism. The chapter first traces the development of post-war Greek tourism up to the recent economic/financial crisis, on the threshold of the coronavirus pandemic. We further discuss the historical, institutional, and socioeconomic dimensions of Greek tourism, from the perspective of its contribution to Greek society, despite its unfulfilled potential due to an impaired concertation around integrative planning and mismanagement issues at various levels. Greek tourism thus appears both as a “story of success” and symbol of “what not to do and still succeed,” i.e., overexploited and/or depleted assets and resources, underrated or neglected problems and challenges so far, and untapped potential. We conclude with latent and apparent opportunities based on local and bottom-up tourism development initiatives that directly contributed to drawing on this successful experience, while taking advantage of diverse cultural and natural assets.