By A. Tsiblakis
The professional pleasure craft market is currently down 20 percent in comparison with 2015, with the timid signs of recovery seen last year mostly evaporating over the first seven months of 2016.
The sector includes speedboats, sailboats and catamarans.
According to Antonis Stelliatos, the president of the Hellenic Professional Yacht Owners Association, the reasons his group attributes for yet another negative year are the refugee/migrant crisis over the past year and a half, recent instability in Turkey, as well as the fact that an electronic registry for such marine craft has not operated in the three years since it was legislated. The latter, Stelliatos said, continues to make it difficult to combat bootleg leasing of pleasure craft.
The refugee/migrant crisis that plagued Greece merely substituted destinations in the northern Aegean and the Dodecanese islands for other sea regions, such as the Ionian Sea, west of mainland Greece, as well as Montenegro and even Croatia, Stelliatos said. He added that the increase in the Ionian’s popularity served as a “silver lining” for the sector.
He also pointed to what he claimed was “unfair competition” from illegally chartered vessels on third country registries.
Stelliatos said he attended an event focused on maritime tourism two weeks ago on the iconic northern Dodecanese island of Patmos, where he noted that “in the island’s harbor and gulf there were anchored vessels flying Turkish or US flags; there wasn’t even one vessel with a European flag.”
