“Being impeccable with your word,” as presented in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book “The Four Agreements , means using the power of your word with integrity and responsibility, saying only what you mean, and following through. Corresponding to a widely known phrase in the Greek vocabulary: ο λόγος μου είναι συμβόλαιο (my word is my bond)! And that is exactly how it should be, that is, that our word be a promise, that is, that we do not forget what we promised.
And so, after 10 years of discussions between the Ministry of Greek Tourism and the Greek Community of Melbourne (GCM) to establish a Greek National Tourism Office in Melbourne (GNTO), there is still unfinished business. In May 2014, the Minister of Tourism of Greece, Olga Kefalogianni, met with tour operators and the GCM in Melbourne and confirmed the plans to establish its presence in Melbourne to promote tourism to Greece from the Australian market. None can deny that good intentions matter – they are a starting point – but for real impact, they usually need knowledge, supporting evidence, persistence, and reflection to be meaningful.
Have they been impeccable with their words?
The Greek-Australian media has been running this as a mainstream story recently with a focus on the inertia by the GNTO to proceed with its promise. The commitment of the GCM all these years for a free rent office that” Without rent , the cost would be minimal, but the returns would be multiple – much greater than the investment with millions of dollars channeled into the strongest sector of the Greek economy.” In other words, a very generous gesture for rent free space in the central business district of Melbourne for a GNTO office in the GCM premises.
This free rent promise changed in 2024 when some progress was being made:
“We have committed to providing the necessary space in the Greek Center building to host the GNTO offices, offering free use of the facilities for two years, without financial burden, in exchange for the (Greek) government’s support to our community during the economic crisis.”
Rent free and rent free for two years is not the same. This change of rhetoric may have contributed to the current standstill and led (and rightly so) to the GNTO revising the financial rationale for such expenditure on a cost-benefit analysis and the two sides need to bring the matter to a close professionally, instead of taking their concerns in the public domain.
So after 10 years, “The process is progressing,” insists the Greek National Tourism Organization, however, the impatience of the GCM is evident according to the Greek-Australian media, which also points out that ” in 2018, approximately 180,000 Australians traveled to Greece each year, but now this number has exceeded 350,000 annually.” Incidentally, it is noteworthy that there are no “tourism offices” of other European countries in Melbourne with the exception of services through consulates/consular missions, which operate as information points — but not as tourist offices in the sense of a GNTO office.
Is there a need for such a GNTO in Melbourne in 2025?
In recent years, a phenomenon of overtourism has been emerging in Greece which can have significant consequences, both positive (mainly economic) and negative (social, environmental, cultural, demographic). One in three euros that Greece earns each year comes from tourism, demonstrating the Greek economy’s dependence on the sector. With both direct and secondary benefits – it is estimated to range between 62.8 billion and 75.6 billion euros, corresponding to between 28.5% and 34.3% of Greece’s GDP. Per capita spending by tourists in Greece has been decreasing since 2022. In 2022, 27.8 million tourists visited our country with a per capita spending of 633 euros . The corresponding figures for 2023 and 2024 are: 32.7 million tourists with a per capita spending of 626 and 40.7 million tourists with a per capita spending of 531 ! This is not to deny that spending by Australians may be higher but the message is a trend towards overtourism.
The focus on the continuous development of tourism according to the emerging evidence, and through the bibliography, is that the price of the “cities that never sleep” is high: the working and middle classes abandon them, the cost of housing and living is on the rise, the infrastructure is crumbling from overcrowding, while the economy becomes addicted to easy profit, lagging behind in the necessary technological and productive transformations. (Georgos Rakkas: Overtourism – Careless capitalism and the social crisis of the city). The Greek diaspora ought to provide suggestions for the “right” direction that Greece should follow to develop its economy in a balanced way. In this direction, it is also noteworthy to consider the highly regarded work in the area of tourism of Greek-Australian academic Marianna Sigala with a focus on “how destination managers (can) use technologies to monitor and measure the impacts of tourism to make decisions about sustainable destination management and management of tourism flows.”
In conclusion, in the absence of some kind of a formal evaluation study that supports in a positive way the establishment of a GNTO office in Melbourne, the evidence does not really establish the case for one, in comparison to what the situation was 10 years ago. Both sides ought to bring to a close the issue professionally, instead of letting it drag on in perpetuity, unless a clear business case can be made that captures the reasoning for initiating such a project in 2025.
* Dr. Steve Bakalis is an expert in international business education and management, having worked with the Australian National University, the University of Adelaide, and in administrative positions at universities in the Asia-Pacific and the Arab Gulf States.
