Some less-scrupulous Greeks regard this dependence as possessing a rich potential for income. If another resort or country offers good value, people will vote with their feet.”. The repertoire of rip-offs that antagonises the visitor to Greece is by no means unique, but swindles seem to arrive with alarming frequency in some parts of the country. Transport is of fundamental importance to the traveller visiting an archipelago of 100-odd islands.

People expect it to be a relatively cheap holiday and that’s not been the case over the past couple of years.”If there is good value, people will go to Greece in large numbers. Dudley der Parthog, of Sunvil Travel, which specialises in Greek holidays, agreed: “Turkey is definitely catching up. It’s 70 per cent up on last year and Greece is 20 per cent down for us.”Major tour operators, like Thomson Holidays, are reported to be pulling out of package holidays to the more distant Greek islands such as Leros and Skopelos.First Choice Travel, the United Kingdom’s third biggest tour operator, has also felt the backlash from holidaymakers fed up with the price rises.Its group marketing director, Kevin Ivie, warned: “Greece needs to be significantly more competitive. The general feeling we are getting from people is that a holiday in Greece is not affordable.”Alex Woolfall, of the Association of British Travel Agents (Abta), said: “There hasn’t been the demand that there was for Greece last year. Other holiday destinations, particularly Turkey, have seen a surge in popularity.”In fact, Turkey, due to its weak currency, is now “on level pegging” with Greece, according to the tour operator Inspirations.

The costs which the holidaymaker experiences have risen quite considerably since last year. Disgruntled holidaymakers have returned home this year complaining about expensive hotels selling expensive alcohol. Both commodities are traditionally cheap in Greece.
Laskarina Holidays, which has sent British tourists to Greece for the past 20 years, is already feeling the pinch. Ian Murdoch, its managing director, said yesterday: “We have detailed questionnaires from our clients, and the message is that, in hotels and restaurants, people are not spending money Couples are ordering one salad with two sets of cutlery. A pint of beer is now the same as it is in Britain, and you don’t expect that in Greece.”The result is [that], because people now can’t afford to buy a bottle of wine, restaurants are charging the same price for a bottle of water.

In the meantime, ironically, it has become a wonderfully uncrowded place with plenty of deserted beaches Sounds almost good enough for a holiday.. Greece has always enjoyed a position as one of the top three most popular holiday destinations for British tourists But now, its place is under threat – from arch enemy Turkey. He hopes to double the promotion budget for tourism – for example arranging a convention for foreign tourist operators in Athens in the next few days to try to win them back over.Mr Sifounakis wants to restore his country’s reputation as a cheap destination (it is still a bit cheaper than either Italy or Spain) while building proper facilities such as luxury yachting marinas for visitors with serious money.The best hope for Greece, perhaps, is to emulate Italy or France – charging more than it used to but making sure that standards rise, too. Nikos Sifoun-akis, the dynamic new minister for tourism, has just replaced the president of the National Tourist Organisation and launched a series of initiatives to repair Greece’s tattered reputation. If that’s the reception we get in our positions, imagine what it’s like for ordinary visitors.”There are, nevertheless, signs of improvement. “A restaurant on Santorini where my brother owns some tourist flats treated us foully this year.

But even senior employees admit, off the record, that this is nonsense.”People are rude and charge far too much,” one employee said. This summer, like most others, has thus been disrupted by air-traffic control strikes, constant delays at Olympic Airways, the national airline, and disputes on the shipping lines connecting Athens with the islands.It is this mentality that caused the Greek Hoteliers’ Association to overcharge foreign tour operators with such disregard for the consequences this year that it wound up with a flood of cancellations.And it is this mentality that has turned the National Tourist Organisation into a bureaucratic sludge-pit in which employees spend much of their time reading the newspapers and organising free villa holidays for their friends over the telephone.The organisation has tried to defend the high prices tourists are being charged by arguing that cheap holidays only attract cheap people, and that the chaos of a Greek holiday is all part of the charm of the place. Hotels charge up to four-star prices but they very rarely provide more than two-star service.Much of the tourist industry is still prey to a mentality that encourages time-serving rather than efficiency, corruption rather than public service and confrontational labour disputes rather than progress towards greater productivity. Boats are often overcrowded, while hired cars are extremely expensive. Consumer prices have jumped as much as tenfold in the past decade, reflecting a sharp rise in living standards for Greeks, but improvements in the country’s infrastructure, services and tourism marketing have lagged far behind.As Greece waits for a series of EC-sponsored public works projects to get off the ground, trains are painfully slow and motorways virtually non-existent. But then Greece can no longer afford to be a cheap and cheerful southern Balkan backwater as it tries to catch up with the European mainstream.The tourist industry seems to have got stuck in the middle of the modernisation process. The conditions are no worse and it is far cheaper,” Drossoula Elliott, editor of the English-language monthly magazine the Athenian, said.This does not sound much like the great idyll of sun-kissed beaches, of cheap retsina (local white wine) and Shirley Valentine-style romance that first attracted the tourists in the early Seventies.