Staff at the Rodos Princess Beach Hotel in Rhodes had an unusual job when preparing the resort for the height of the summer season: scraping fire-damaged bark from the trunks of palm trees overlooking the swimming pool.
“We shaved them to get rid of the burned wood, so that guests will not be scared from the images of the fire,” said manager Christos Panayiotou. “They’ve been drilled down with a chainsaw, but you can still see the marks on the trees.”
He is referring to the damage inflicted by wildfires, which raged across the Greek island a year ago, resulting in an evacuation of 25,000 people and the destruction of about 135,000 hectares of forest.
Based in the southern Rhodes village of Kiotari, the four-star Rodos resort was at the heart of the disaster. Almost a third of the building, including its kitchen, restaurant and reception balcony, was destroyed in the 10-day conflagration along with an affiliated hotel nearby.
The fire-damaged trees are now the only visible sign of the catastrophe following a €10mn refurbishment. The Greek fires made global headlines yet the Rodos Princess this year is “almost full until the end of the season,” said Andriana Hatzilazarou, marketing director and a board member of H Hotels Collection, which owns the resort.
However, with the risks of wildfires, droughts and heatwaves growing, they exemplify a dilemma for the European travel industry: how to invest and adapt to climate change as holidaymakers seek out less risky destinations.
“We know that [climate change] is an existential threat to tourism,” said Teodora Marinska, chief operating officer of the European Travel Commission, a non-profit organisation that promotes tourism around the continent. “And we know that weather plays a big role when people choose their destination.”
UK-based luxury hotel members agency Little Emperors has experienced this shift first-hand. Bookings for Greece, which had risen 20 per cent annually in recent years, were down 7 per cent for July and August compared to last year, while those for breaks in the English countryside rose 17 per cent and Norway and Sweden were up 23 per cent.
“The traditional beach destinations have become less attractive during the heatwave,” said chief executive Rebecca Masri. The increase in popularity during so-called shoulder months in autumn may be explained by cheaper room rates, but “the price becomes illogical with the extreme weather” during the peak season, she added.
Customers are increasingly booking at the last minute to see what the weather would look like. “People don’t want to go and spend all that money on a luxury holiday and be stuck in a room with an [air conditioner] and not be able to go outside for daylight,” Masri said.
A single night at the Hotel Grande Bretagne overlooking the Acropolis in Athens, for instance, currently starts at about €1,000 a night. The Acropolis was partially shut last month as temperatures rose to about 40C, while thousands of Athenian residents were evacuated from their homes last week as wildfires encroached on the outskirts of the Greek capital.
Climate change made the extreme fire-prone weather of 2023-24 twice as likely in Greece, a new State of Wildfires report from academic and scientific experts from a group of UK and European institutions and agencies this month concluded.
One consolation for hoteliers may be that tourists are still coming but are spreading trips throughout the year. Danielle, a 68-year-old tourist from France’s north east Moselle region, enjoyed a holiday in Kiotari in June together with 20 friends and relatives. “We came here because it was June. We would not have been here in July or August — it’s just too hot,” she said.
Little Emperors said bookings for Greece in September and October are up 31 per cent, a surge also seen in Southern France and Italy.
Hatzilazarou said that H Hotels is looking at measures to extend its open season from early November until December — if this is deemed financially worthwhile. But a prolonged season means hiring staff for longer and is also dependent on flight schedules.
H Hotels has implemented a series of measures to prevent heat stroke, including sending guests warning messages to their phones when the temperature rises beyond 40C. The group is still negotiating a fire-related insurance claim.
At some local restaurants and gift shops, surrounded by fields with burnt olive trees and bushes, the mood is gloomier.
“Heat is getting worse every year, and tourists staying at all-inclusive resort hotels nearby are increasingly locking themselves in the hotel because it’s too hot to walk around,” said Nektarios Pethakas, whose family owns Il Ponte restaurant in Kiotari. The seafood restaurant lost €50,000 due to the fire last year having filled the fridge with fish for the peak season.
Despoina, owner of a nearby beach shop, estimates the number of visitors this year is half that of 2023. She predicts that in a decade there will be fewer people in the peak summer season, adding that her business is now “a little difficult”.
The local government is also considering the future. George Toppos, the deputy mayor of tourism and culture in Rhodes, said it was drafting a plan for the first time to assess how tourism, including the number of visitors and new hotel developments, is affecting the local environment.
“We need a right balance [between them] . . . we don’t have any problem right now but we’ll have to monitor it and after 10 years, maybe we’ll have a problem,” he said.
Asked if there is a need to limit development, Toppos said: “We might have to take care of [that issue].”
Bigger companies have more flexibility to adapt — but there are still risks and costs.
Hotelplan UK, an operator which owns brands such as Inghams and Inntravel, had already pulled out from lower altitude Alpine ski resorts a decade ago in response to snow shortages.
It plans to expand in Nordic countries and is also investing in designing and marketing more walking tours. John Mansell, managing director of Inghams, believes it would be another 20 years before climate change has a dramatic effect on the industry but warned: “We’ve been working with these hotels for years. We’ve got an obligation to make sure that we keep them running . . . even when there is a lack of snow to be able to ski properly” in places such as Austria and Italy.
Tui, Europe’s largest travel group, has expanded its year-round offerings in Turkey’s Antalya and has also increased capacity for the winter season.
Chief executive Sebastian Ebel told the Financial Times that the company was also seeing “strong growth” in northern Europe, although the region only accounts for 1 per cent of the group’s business.
But he said heatwaves were unlikely to dent mass summer tourism in the Mediterranean, arguing that “cost inflation or capacity constraints have a far bigger impact on where customers go to”, with many also beholden to the timing of school holidays.
“When there are incidents, there may be a shift from the affected destination to another destination for a short time, but it will not take long before holidaymakers choose the affected destination again,” said Ebel.
The group, which reported disruption costs of €25mn due to the Rhodes wildfire evacuation last year, had two weeks of fewer bookings following the incident but rebounded soon after.
Ioannis Papavasiliou, president of the Rhodes Hotel Association, said hotels on the island had experienced an annual 15 per cent increase in bookings this year, partly helped by the government’s programme to give free holidays to those who evacuated last year.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2023 wildfires, international air arrivals in Rhodes dropped 11 per cent in July compared to the same month a year earlier. However, for the year as a whole, they were up 3 per cent at 2.6mn according to the Greek Tourism Confederation.
Hatzilazarou said she was “not concerned” about climate change potentially disrupting tourism. “It might come soon . . . [but] people who live in cold places will choose beaches in the Mediterranean,” she said.
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