Athens has noted a growth in short-term rentals and hotel accommodation, while the Athens International Airport (AIA) noted its highest passenger traffic for 2019 with 25.57 million passengers (up 6 per cent from 2018).
Despite the tourism boom, there has been a decline in occupancy rates at hotels in Athens according to the Athens-Attica & Argosaronic Hotel Association. Data shows that there was a drop of 8.8 per cent in some cases with the exception of peak season (August-September) when occupancy was the same as 2018.
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The drop in the decline of hotel occupancy could be due to the increase in the number of available rooms in the centre of Athens which grew by 7 per cent from 2015 to 2019 (3 per cent in eastern Attica, 1 per cent in southern Athens, 5 per cent in northern Athens). There were 91,200 properties registered on Airbnb as short-term rentals at the start of January, up 25 per cent from a year earlier.
Between June 2018 and May 2019, Airbnb and HomeAway had 170,542 properties registered on their platforms.