Finance
Greece's travel sector sees 6 billion euro surplus in first half of 2025
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on August 21, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 22, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on August 21, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 22, 2026
Greece's travel sector achieved a €6 billion surplus in H1 2025, a 9.1% increase. Travel receipts rose 11%, driven by higher EU and US contributions.
(Reuters) -The Greek travel services sector saw a surplus of 6 billion euros ($7 billion) in the first half of 2025, a 9.1% increase from the previous year, the data from the Bank of Greece showed on Thursday.
In January to June, travel receipts rose 11% from the same period last year to 7.6 billion euros, driven by a 24% increase in travel payments and a 10.1% rise in average expenditure per overnight stay.
Tourism accounts for more than a quarter of economic output, making the expenditure by visitors closely followed data.
In that period, receipts from residents of the 27-country European Union grew by 8.5% to 4.1 billion euros, and receipts from other countries grew 13.7% to 3.2 billion euros, with receipts from euro zone members Germany, France and Italy being the leading contributors to the growth.
Receipts from non-EU member Britain also grew by 7.3% to 1.2 billion euros and receipts from the United States were up 29.4% to 704.3 million euros.
In the first half of 2025, the number of inbound travellers to Greece rose 0.6% to 11.7 million, remaining at the roughly the same number as in 2024.
While the travel traffic through airports grew 4.9%, the traffic across road border-crossing points decreased by 13.1%, the Bank of Greece said.
($1 = 0.8588 euros)
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Alison Williams)
A travel surplus occurs when the income generated from tourism, such as travel receipts, exceeds the expenditures by residents traveling abroad.
Travel receipts refer to the total amount of money spent by foreign visitors in a country, including accommodation, food, and entertainment.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the total monetary value of all goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period.
Inbound travelers are individuals who travel to a country from abroad, contributing to the local economy through spending on various services.
Average expenditure per overnight stay is the average amount of money spent by travelers for each night they stay in accommodations.
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