Athens eyes hotel limits

Athens is weighing limits on new hotel licences in the city centre as officials try to slow tourism growth before the capital tips into overtourism. (euronews.com) Mayor Haris Doukas raised the idea at the “This is Athens - Agora” event on April 21, saying the city needs to decide “if and how many more hotels we need and where.” He said some areas are already saturated and “must not become Barcelona.” (euronews.com) The discussion is focused on central districts already carrying the heaviest visitor load, including the Commercial Triangle, Kolonaki and the area around the Acropolis, according to local reporting on the mayor’s proposal. (greekreporter.com) Athens is not starting from zero. Greece already froze new short-term rental permits in three central Athens neighbourhoods, and Doukas said hotel limits are now part of the same debate over how many extra beds the city can absorb. (euronews.com) The pressure is visible in the numbers. Attica has 68,934 hotel beds, about 35,000 of them in greater central Athens, while Athens International Airport handled 22.71 million passengers in the first eight months of 2025, up 6.8 percent from a year earlier. (euronews.com) (media.aia.gr) The city has already imposed crowd controls at its biggest draw. Greece capped Acropolis entries at 20,000 visitors a day in 2023 after summer days with as many as 23,000 visitors, and added hourly slots to spread arrivals. (euronews.com) Hotel operators are not rejecting the conversation outright. Evgenios Vassilikos, who heads the Athens-Attica and Argosaronic Hotel Association, said Athens needs comprehensive planning across hotels, short-term rentals and other tourist accommodation rather than piecemeal growth. (euronews.com) Officials are explicitly looking at other European cities for models. Doukas and Vassilikos both pointed to Barcelona and Amsterdam, where restrictions on new tourist accommodation have been used in high-pressure areas. (euronews.com) Barcelona is the clearest reference point in this debate. The city has stopped issuing new hotel licences in central areas and plans to let more than 10,000 tourist-apartment licences expire by November 2028 instead of renewing them. (idealista.com) Athens has not announced a final cap or a start date yet. For now, the city is moving from warnings about overtourism to a concrete question: whether central Athens should stop adding more tourist beds. (euronews.com)