Up until recently Cyprus’ tourism sector was being managed by an agency also handling energy, commerce and industry after revenue from tourism within the first nine months of 2018 rose to 2.27 billion euros.

As of yesterday, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades has sworn in Savvas Perdios as the country’s first-ever dedicated Deputy Minister for Tourism.

The new office will be called a Deputy Ministry but will also assume all the responsibilities of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation that will be shut down.

Mr Perdios, a financier and the former Chief Operations Officer at Louis Hotels which manages 25 mainly resort properties in Cyprus and Greece, will be overseeing the sector and try to implement a new strategy in order to attract more visitors to the island and also increase holiday spending.

“We’ve demanded the creation of a tourism ministry for decades given its importance for the economy,” Harris Loizides, President of the Cyprus Hotel Association, told Bloomberg.

“The new ministry will have to tackle many issues including new legislation for the classification of hotels and implementing the country’s new tourism strategy.”

The sector also accounted for 22.3 per cent of the island’s economic output in 2017.

“The new deputy ministry will implement Cyprus’s national tourism strategy with the necessary horizontal policies, tourism development planning and wider political supervision of the sector,” Government Spokesman Prodromos Prodromou said praising Perdios’ knowledge.

This news comes as Hong Kong billionaire Lawrence Ho is building the City of Dreams Mediterranean casino on the island, a Melco International establishment due to open in 2021 and expected to attract over 300,000 tourists annually to Aphrodite’s island.

Source: neoskosmos