Santorini Update - Things are "darkening"

by Victor Matsas • 05 Mar 2025

Location: Greece, Santorini

Today's post is indicative of the difficult situation that prevails this year on the island of Santorini. Two weeks earlier we had written that, beyond April, there was no significant price reduction, but a closer look was extremely revealing.
Santorini Update - Things are
The reason why a first glance deceived us somewhat is shown by the analysis of the sale prices of the hotel Katikies Chromata, which is one of the most famous and renowned on the island.

With the help of Hotel Insider we searched for the cheapest room someone could book for a 3 day stay. We chose not to take into account the Genius discount in our calculations and asked him to give us a comparison of prices and availability of the 5-star market with those prevailing 2 weeks ago.

The results are shown in the first diagram: Booking's Partner Offer (in red) literally tears up Hotel Insider's suggested rate aisle from the bottom and leaves the hotel a few days to sell at the prices it set (in yellow). The success rate of Hotel Insider's suggested prices over minimum sale prices is just 74%. We also observe a slight drop in prices for the period end of July - beginning of September.

In the second diagram we did the same search but we chose to take into account the Genius Discount on all hotels that are available along with Katikies Chromata. We are surprised to see that the impression rate of Booking's partner offer has dropped significantly and the success rate of HI has risen to 88%. Also now comes to the surface a remarkable broad decline in the weighted average of the market starting from the end of June and reaching the end of September.

How can this be explained?

Booking's partner offers are based on static contracts. As they come forward, they act as an impenetrable veil that prevents us from seeing the hoteliers' movements. However, the crisis caused by the earthquakes depressed prices so much that in many cases the price with the Genius discount comes out even more advantageous than the Partner Offer!
So applying Genius and comparing it with the past revealed both the size and breadth of the price drop.