Greece recorded more than 35 million tourist arrivals between January and October 2025, a figure that runs triple the country's 10 million residents and is anchoring a fresh wave of hotel deal flow across the Mediterranean country.

At the Atlantic Ocean Hotel Investors' Summit in Madrid, executives from CBRE, Azora, Sani/Ikos Group and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts framed Greece as Europe's tightest-supply hotel investment destination — and its most contested bidding ground. The implications for sellers of travel run through expanded inventory in Athens, Santorini, Crete, Corfu, Kos and the emerging Mani Peninsula.

What is driving capital into Greek hotel assets?

Supply scarcity is the headline metric. Artyom Perevedentsev, CBRE's director of hotel investment properties for Europe, said Greece's hotel supply ranks among Europe's lowest, a condition that has lifted average daily rate across active operator pipelines.

Deal sizes have scaled. In October 2024, Greek shipping tycoon George Prokopiou paid €150 million to Turkish firm Dogus Group for a 33.75% stake in the Astir Palace Resort in Vouliagmeni, home to the 303-room Four Seasons Hotel Astir Palace Athens. He acquired the remaining share in March 2025 from Dubai-based AGC Equity Partners, which had bought the property in October 2016 for roughly €443 million when it operated with 162 rooms. The value uplift on a repositioned, expanded luxury asset illustrates how scarcity compounds in a constrained market.

Spanish investment firm Azora, which manages a €1.8 billion hospitality fund, has moved slowly. Gonzalo García-Lago, Azora's senior partner of hospitality and leisure, said the firm spent 18 months on its first Greek acquisition and three and a half years on the second. Azora plans to keep investing.

"It is time-consuming. At points I felt like quitting [the market], but we want to keep investing in Greece," García-Lago said.

In August, Azora bought a 50.1% stake in Donkey Hotels from family-run firm Ioannou at an undisclosed price. Donkey operates five hotels — four in Athens, one in Santorini — with 834 rooms, and the joint venture targets nationwide growth.

Which operators control the pipeline?

Family-owned Sani/Ikos Group, whose principal asset is Sani Resort in Halkidiki, runs 12 resorts and roughly 3,450 rooms across Greece and Spain. The group carries a pipeline of approximately 2,250 rooms for its Ikos flag in Greece, Spain and Portugal. Carlos Nieto, the group's senior acquisitions director, said Greek pricing power continues to expand.

"We have space in which to grow. We are seeing more guests from Russia and [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries," Nieto said.

Dimitris Manikis, Wyndham's president and managing director for EMEA, framed the supply-side ecosystem as open to disruption. He predicted a single dominant domestic white-label management company will emerge in Greece within five years, as legacy operators retire and international capital demands local execution partners.

"In the next five years there will be established a dominant Greek white-label management company," Manikis said.

What is squeezing competition for sellers of travel?

Local capital remains the hardest variable. García-Lago described Greek investors as "perhaps the toughest negotiators in Europe."

"We face a great deal of competition from local investors. They have done great work, they have a lot of cash, and they have a different sense of how to tackle issues than does institutional capital," he said.

That dynamic shapes deal economics in core Greek markets by favoring well-capitalized local bidders over institutional capital — a structural tilt that has stretched entry timelines in Greece from roughly 18 months to nearly five years for some funds.

Which feeder markets are reshaping demand?

India is the newest incremental source. Manikis flagged Indian travelers as culturally drawn to historic destinations rather than beach product.

"[Indians] do not want to sit on the beach. They have a similar culture in that [India and Greece] are very old civilizations," he said.

Climate is also reshaping seasonality. Manikis said the Greek summer has grown too hot for traditional shoulder travel, yet warming has stretched the booking calendar to 11 months. The planned expansion of Kalamata airport, he added, will accelerate development of the Mani Peninsula and the wider Peloponnese, the regions he named as Greece's hospitality frontier.

Manikis cast Greece's trajectory from the sovereign-debt era to a 35-million-arrival year as a reference point for other reforming markets. "It was the black sheep of Europe in 2014," he said. Whether the local-management, climate and feeder-market mix that defined 2025 holds against the next demand shock will shape Europe's distribution map for the rest of the decade.