The island is investing heavily in European tourism promotion while also limiting cruise arrivals and taking measures to manage visitor numbers during the busiest periods
Santorini has arrived at an interesting point in its long and complicated relationship with tourism: the island is busy enough to be worried about overtourism, crowded enough to introduce measures aimed at managing visitor flows, and popular enough to remain one of the world’s most recognizable destinations, yet it is still spending considerable effort reminding Europe that it would very much like you to come and visit.
The latest tourism campaign is targeting France and Switzerland, with the Municipality of Thira partnering with airlines to promote Santorini through some rather impressive advertising channels. In France, the campaign with Transavia will display images of the island on 205 digital screens at 11 major stations along Paris Metro Line 14, the line connecting central Paris with Orly Airport. The network reaches millions of passengers every day, giving Santorini a fairly substantial audience in one of Europe’s most important tourism markets.
And the Metro campaign is only part of the operation.
Under the slogan “Beyond the Postcard,” the promotion will also reach Transavia’s enormous customer base through a newsletter sent to its 10 million registered users, banners on the airline’s main website, which receives around 2.4 million visitors each month, push notifications through its app to approximately 1.9 million users, and social media promotion through Transavia France.
The timing is deliberate, with the municipality hoping to attract more French visitors during the autumn school holidays, known as the Vacances de la Toussaint, thereby extending demand beyond the traditional summer peak.
Transavia currently connects Santorini directly with Paris, Lyon and Nantes, operating a total of 12 flights per week, and the municipality considers the airline one of its key partners in the French market.
The island is also turning its attention to Switzerland, where a four-month joint campaign with Edelweiss Air, part of the Lufthansa Group, will promote Santorini to potential visitors and tourism professionals. The campaign includes a B2B event at Zurich Airport, digital promotion on the airline’s website with an estimated reach of more than 500,000 impressions, online banners in Swiss media and social media activity through Edelweiss.
The Zurich-Santorini route has also seen a 3% increase in capacity this year, reaching approximately 14,600 seats, while average occupancy stands at 76%, according to municipal figures.
All of which sounds like a perfectly sensible tourism strategy until you remember that Santorini has spent the last several years grappling with precisely the opposite problem: too many visitors arriving at the same time.
The island has introduced measures to manage cruise tourism and visitor flows, with authorities increasingly concerned about the pressure placed on infrastructure, roads, archaeological sites, beaches and local communities during the busiest months. Cruise arrivals in particular have become part of a much larger discussion about how many people the island can comfortably accommodate on any given day.
So, naturally, Santorini is now advertising itself across the Paris Metro, sending promotional messages to millions of airline customers and investing in new international tourism partnerships.
There is, however, a method behind what might initially look like a rather magnificent contradiction.
The objective is not necessarily to attract an unlimited number of additional visitors in the middle of August. Instead, the municipality is increasingly looking at when visitors arrive and how they experience the island, with campaigns aimed at strengthening demand outside the most congested periods and encouraging visitors who arrive by air and stay overnight rather than spending a few hours on the island as part of a cruise itinerary.
A visitor who flies to Santorini and stays for several nights spreads their spending across the island and its businesses, while thousands of cruise passengers can arrive simultaneously, crowding roads, attractions and public spaces before disappearing back onto their ships a few hours later.
The municipality says its strategy is therefore not based on Santorini’s already enormous international recognition, but on maintaining a continuous presence in key markets, strengthening existing air connections and creating demand beyond the traditional peak season.
“Beyond the Postcard” is perhaps an appropriate slogan in more ways than one. Santorini has long since graduated from being merely a beautiful photograph on somebody’s travel wishlist, and the island now has to figure out how to manage the enormous popularity that those photographs helped create.
For a destination that is simultaneously trying to manage visitor pressure and encourage visitation, the challenge is no longer simply how to attract tourists.
It is which tourists to attract, when to bring them, and how many the island can accommodate without sacrificing the very experience they came to see.
And the answer begins with 205 digital screens in the Paris Metro.
