Greece May Cap Cruise Ship Visits to Most Popular Islands

Greece’s Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said today that the time has come to place restrictions on the number of cruise ships visiting the country’s most popular islands.

“I think we’ll do it next year,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg.    

Details are vague, but Prime Minister Mitsotakis indicated measures could see the total number of island berths reduced, or a bidding process introduced for slots. 

Any travel advisor who has sent clients on a cruise that visits some of these islands – namely Santorini and Mykonos – during high season in the past two years will know, they’re flooded with visitors, as is much of Greece.

According to Bloomberg, Greece saw 32.7 million tourists in 2023, 18% more than in 2022. Just for the first quarter of 2024, the country has already seen a nearly 25% increase in visitors. Cruise arrivals jumped by more than 50% in 2023 and generated $910 million in revenue, more than double that of 2022.

In 2023, Santorini was Greece’s most popular cruise stop with some 800 vessels calling on the island, carrying almost 1.3 million visitors – a nearly 17% jump from 2022, according to the Hellenic Ports Association, as reported by Bloomberg.

Mykonos is similarly under strain from cruise ship visits. The island saw 749 visits in 2023, an increase of more than 23% from 2022.

Though Greece is notorious for being slow to move when it comes to legislation in general, just the threat of caps impacted cruise stocks today, with prices down an average of 5% to 10%, according to an email from Truist Securities. 

Analyst Patrick Scholes pointed out that Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings is the most exposed to any Greek Isles restrictions, with about 10% of its fleet deployed to the Eastern Med. Carnival has about 7% deployed in the Eastern Med and Royal Caribbean 5%.  

Greece would not be the first European country to look at capping cruise ship visits. Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain both put in restrictions on cruising to Venice, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, respectively.