Jut back from a couple of weeks on a dozen Greek islands and want to express my dismay at the bad services provided by the municipal and national tourist information offices there.
You'd think that a country with such huge revenue from tourism and so many tourists (and probably so many EU money for tourism infrastructure development) would put some work in providing good information services, but no.
- in many tourist towns, these offices are simply lacking
- where they are, the opening times fit those of civil servants only (mon-fri 9-2), ignoring the fact that tourists are awake beyond siesta as well and even at weekends
- None of them have their opening times listed on the door - so that if you arrive during their siesta you never know when they are actually open
- None of them bother to glue a map of town to the window just in case a traveller arrives after closing time and just needs simple directions
- at the airports I visited during reasonable hours, the tourism booth was empty with just a scattering of useless folders left on the desk (never a good map)
- the staff at all these booths are apparently instructed never to recommend any private place - so if you ask for a nice central hotel or a romantic restaurant, all they say is that they're not allowed to tell you
- I found that the Heraklion office was the worst (rude staff, badly photocopied maps of town). In Ayios Nikolas on Crete I found the best one; the staff had - on own initiative - collected information on all museums and accommodation options in town and had businesscards of all of them available, and had a complete overview of events listed. I nearly cried.
In practice, it's the local travel agents and expat websites that have more to tell about these destinations that the tourism offices. Perhaps it's not fair to compare Greece to northern Europe (actually, why not after 30 years of mass tourism - and haven't Greek tourism officials ever visited a country with proper infrastructure?), but just imagine that these offices were full of useful brochures, smiling multilingual staff, open later than noon, properly signposted, supplied with an up to date map of town and an overview of accommodation and prices. These offices usually generate income by selling events tickets, books, hiking maps, booking hotels etc - not so in Greece.
Still, I had a great time there :)
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<hr>the staff at all these booths are apparently instructed never to recommend any private place - so if you ask for a nice central hotel or a romantic restaurant, all they say is that they're not allowed to tell you<hr></blockquote>
that is understandable for a place run by public money! I would be furious if I owned a hotel or restaurant and found that the staff at the place I paid for by my tax-money recommended another specific place.
Your sad experiences are probably due to the fact that they do not have to do any better - Greece is full of tourists and has been so for 30-40 years even with this bad service (and 90% arrive on charter/package tours and do not use the offices).
“just imagine that these offices were full of useful brochures, smiling multilingual staff, open later than noon, properly signposted, supplied with an up to date map of town and an overview of accommodation and prices.”
Hmm… and maybe Rent Room owners in villages could smile and say ‘have a nice day’ and waiters could cringe and fawn instead of coming over to your table in their own good time…. But then you’d miss out on an essential quality of Greece, which is that – unlike so many tourist destinations - it is NOT a ‘service culture’ and hopefully never will be. I do sympathise with your frustrations, because Greece’s public sector remains a repository of job-for-life inefficiency, but there are other ways to get information (local travel agents), and many other advantages of travelling there. In fact, I’m glad it hasn’t changed that much in thirty years.
>understandable for a place run by public money!
Well, instead of trying to provide a balanced overview of what IS available, they shrug and prefer not to give information about ANYTHING at all. What kind of a public service is that then? They could at least try to recommend a few places then. At least in Ag.Nik. they had tried to collect information about all the hotels in town and offered local businesses the chance to leave their brochures on a table - better than the empty hall I found in Heraklion.
TroTra: it may be romantic somehow to have a shambolic information infrastructure, but the quality of holidays (especially for first-timers like me) would greatly increase if there were friendly, well-stocked and open tourist offices all over Greece...
I've visited Greece dozens of times and never felt the need to look for or use tourist information offices. I can sympathise with a first time visitor but my own method of preparing for a trip is to use the internet to research the areas I'm visiting. As far as I know, the Greek National Tourist Office has a presence in all major European capitals and they are a very useful source of information.
I agree that a GOOD tourist office would have a list of all restaurants/hotels. Also a classification/information on say pricelevel, High gastronomy, Seaside location, type of food served (Greek, WEuropean, German, British, modern, fast-food...) etc. - things that were "measurable". But if they started to recommend one as a "good place" or "value for money" I would think/guess that they were corrupt.
And probably #2 is corret - and you probably travel to experience foreign cultures - now you have :-) - what I mean - no harm done to you, take it a part of what you remember from Greece.
Good grief ...
Do people depend on the Greek national tourist board for anything? Why should they, with all the other possibilities available, including local outlets? In fact, the growth of the local island outlets over the past 20-30 years is what makes the national outlet irrelevant in most cases.
Be that as it may, complain about it if it helps you feel better ... it won't be of any other use
The Greek National Tourist Organization has always been useless for the public, even in regards to consumer protection.
It is a sector of the ministry of tourism encompassing the chamber of hoteliers assoc, official tour agencies, the promotion of Greece [ex Greece] etc.,
My advice to you is to forward your complaint directly to their site - you've got nothing to lose, perhaps nothing to gain, but I believe that Greece's layback public sector is a direct result of the compliancy expressed in the belief that no change can ever come, so why complain?
g.n.t.o.
Its also useless right now to complain because the whole Greek goverment at the moment is bussy with the Septemper elections .Lets wait and see who's going to be the new minister of tourism and then ......there are thousands of complains not only the one Jeroen mention , most important and critical are the ferry connections and some ship owners that monopolising whole groups of islands with the worst kind of ships ,delays,never ending jurneys, bad service, like the whole of the Dodecanese islands suffers from Mister GA and his ferries monopoly, it took to some friends 25 !!!! hours to get to Piraeus from Kalymnos with the unaccepted for the 21 century ferry boat Romilda. And not only that ,what about the water supplies in the Cyclades ,what about the fires ,only promeses. Why they don't put every Summer from May until Septemper a few thousand soldiers as fire watchers instead of keeping them idle in many barracks. Why they never take care after a dry winter to organize the supply of water in islands of need like most of the Cyclades,and many other whys. Soryy this is not a political forum but some negative things have to be sayed even in a travel forum especially from a Greek. Greece is beautiful even as it is, as mention above ,but that does not means that we should'nt do somethiings to improve our tourism and tourist services.
#4 and #6: I think OP has a good reason to complain. We are not talking about the Moldova tourism board or some post-socialist rural Bulgarian tourism office. Greece has for a long time been a member of the EU and generates a large amount of its GDP from tourism.
On the other hand, Greeks always complain about the uselessness of public services. Bureaucracy seems to be a nightmare, even for Greeks.
I can only remember driving from Thessaloniki to Athens in 1998. We had to pay tolls for a highway that was just in the process of being built. There wasn't a single kilometer of the highway opened to the public, but the first thing that was installed were the toll booths.
What do we learn from that? The further south we are traveling, the more likely anything "official" is going to be useless.
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