Tourism: arrivals up 15.4%, receipts up 14.8%

Greece’s travel receipts rose by 14.8 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period of 2025, according to the balance of payments figures released by the Bank of Greece and reported by Oikonomikos Tachydromos on Thursday 20 August. Over the same period arrivals of non-resident travellers rose by 15.4 percent, that is faster than revenue. The difference is small over the half-year as a whole, but it becomes striking if June is looked at on its own: arrivals were up 6.9 percent, but receipts only 1.2 percent. In practice this means that more visitors came, but that on average they spent less.

The travel balance remains the main reason the surplus of the services balance widened over the half-year. That improvement was largely offset by the deterioration of the balance of other services and, to a lesser extent, of transport. In total, the current account deficit in the first half came to 9.5 billion euros, up by around one billion compared with last year. Contributing to this were the widening of the primary income deficit and the shift of the secondary income balance from surplus to deficit. In June, by contrast, the picture was better: the deficit was contained at 602.8 million euros, that is almost halved.

In the trade sector, exports of goods over the half-year rose by 16.1 percent at current prices, but by only 5.7 percent at constant prices, an indication that much of the increase is due to prices rather than to volume. Imports rose by 4.5 percent at current prices and fell marginally, by 0.2 percent, at constant prices. Excluding fuel, exports strengthened by 7.9 percent. The country’s foreign exchange reserves at the end of June 2026 came to 19.5 billion euros, from 15.3 billion a year earlier, while non-residents’ holdings of Greek bonds and treasury bills reached 9.1 billion. June also saw the early repayment of loans under the Greek Loan Facility.

For the local economies that live off tourism, the critical figure is not the number of visitors but spending per visitor. Islands and coastal areas have invested in infrastructure, staff and services on the expectation of rising revenue, as is shown both by the traffic at the ports, with over half a million cruise passengers in Corfu over seven months, and by the need to strengthen safety on the coasts, with the emergency hiring of thirty lifeguards on Rhodes. If June’s trend continues into the second half of the year, businesses will find themselves with fixed costs and a marginal increase in turnover. The figures for July and August, the two peak months of the season, will show whether this is an isolated slowdown or a structural change in the visitor profile.