Travelling to Greece? Prepare to pay a new tax

Greece introduces a new tax for tourists that leans on tourism boom to financially support future disaster relief efforts, replaces previous hotel tax In 2023, the Greek island of Rhodes, known for sparkling beaches and ancient sites, nursed wounds of devastating wildfires in July where thousands of people were evacuated during the height of travel season, leaving Rhodes to weigh how the crisis will affect its vital tourism sector, which fuels most of its economy and some 20% of Greece's. The tourism sector was hit by heat waves and wildfires in other Mediterranean destinations too and Greece, Italy, Algeria and Tunisia combined lost more than 1,350 square kilometers (520 square miles) to blazes that affected 120,000 people in late July, according to European Union estimates while Greece expected even more extreme heat in the later days. While travel to Greece overall was not hit too hard, fires chased away tourists in hard-hit parts of Greece and Rhodes saw mass cancellations of flights but even without the flames, summer heat intensified by climate change was a turnoff for travellers. Wildfires in the Mediterranean are not unusual but climate change has increased their intensity. A massive flooding in central Greece, that spawned from Storm Daniel in early September 2023, followed a summer of record heatwaves and wildfires with a "very clear climate change fingerprint, quantifying the contribution of global warming to these floods proved more challenging," according to Scientist Friederike Otto, a Climatologist at Imperial College London and Co-Founder of World Weather Attribution (WWA). Fierce rainstorms battered Greece, triggering flooding and leading the police to ban traffic in the central town of Volos, the nearby mountain region of Pilion and the resort island of Skiathos as record rainfall caused death, channelled thigh-high torrents through streets and swept cars away.