Half of all tourism spending in Greece made on southern islands

One in every four euros that foreign tourists spend in Greece is spent on the islands of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese in the Southern Aegean. If one adds Crete, then almost 50 percent of annual expenditure by visitors to Greece is spent on just a couple of dozen islands.

These were among the findings of the statistical processing by the Institute of the Greek Tourism Confederation (INSETE) of 2017 data supplied by the Bank of Greece. The analysis showed that foreign visitors spent 3.65 billion euros on the islands of the Southern Aegean last year, plus 3.26 billion euros on Crete. Therefore those two regions accounted for 48.6 percent of total tourism spending last year in Greece, which amounted to 14.2 billion euros.

Much as Athens has seen its tourism data improve, expenditure in the capital barely topped 2 billion euros last year.

The region with the lowest...