Southern Aegean – Arrivals soar in September – On which islands

In September, the arrivals at the five international airports on the islands of the Southern Aegean have already exceeded half a million.

More specifically, 4,352 direct international flights, from the 1st to the 26th of September, carried 565,850 passengers to the airports of Rhodes, Kos, Santorini, Mykonos and Karpathos.

In detail:

The arrivals on the island of Rhodes are approaching 280,000 and, the last Saturday of the month, about 14,500 passengers arrived on the island in one day. Santorini keeps up momentum with the arrivals, in September, already reaching 90,000. The number of passengers to Kos exceeds 133,000, Mykonos has already gathered about 58,500 passengers, while Karpathos with 9,896 arrivals, to date, exceeds the arrivals on the island during the tourism season of 2020.

The number of passengers arriving from abroad to the five international airports of the Southern Aegean is about 2.76 million.

From the beginning of this year’s tourism season until September 26, the Southern Aegean has more than doubled its total arrivals in 2020, numbering 2.5 million passengers via direct international flights.

In particular, Rhodes has welcomed 1,145,023 passengers, when in 2020 passengers arriving on the island of Rhodes had not exceeded 585,000. Kos broke the record of 500,000 arrivals, while Karpathos welcomed more than 40,000 passengers until September 26.

By the same date, direct international arrivals for the island of Mykonos are two and a half times higher, reaching 335,353, while Santorini tripled the arrivals of 2020 with more than 400,000 arrivals in the current tourism season.

If we also add to these numbers the visitors who used the airport transfer service from the Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos”, in the months of June, July and August, the total number of visitors to the Southern Aegean reaches 2,76 million.

Occupancy of hotels in the Southern Aegean

This year, the occupancy of the hotels on the islands of Southern Aegean exceed by up to 40 percentage points the percentages of last September.

More specifically, according to a survey by the Institute for Tourism Research and Forecasting, for the week of September 1-5 and 6-12, hotel occupancy rates, which remain open at 96.8%, range between 69% and 68.5%, respectively, when the average number of the occupancy rates for September 2020, according to the same survey, was 28.2%.