The vast ballroom at Kallithea’s La Marquise Luxury Resort was a feature on UK TV screens only a few weeks ago when it was filled with hundreds of guests evacuated from other properties as wildfires raged in Rhodes.
“It’s important to know how difficult it was – I can describe it easily, but it wasn’t that easy,” said Michael Karayiannis, general manager of the hotel, located near the more famous resort of Faliraki.
MORE: Got clients heading to Rhodes? Here’s everything they – and you – need to know
After a state of emergency was declared, he suddenly had to find room for 120 extra guests, many of them children. Staff worked around the clock to rotate rooms as guests flew home, with those bedded down in the ballroom given the vacated accommodation.
“We have big rooms so I said, ‘OK, we will take the families’. They were in the ballroom for only one day,” he recalled. “When the kids saw all the pools, they forgot the fires. We did this for four days. Not one person, guest or evacuee, complained.”
Karayiannis released eight staff to fight the fires, but those that remained showed equal resolve. “They stayed in the spa until 2am to coordinate showers in half-hour slots. All the island, I think, is proud of what we all did.”
Karayiannis’s story is typical of many hoteliers who helped evacuate around 20,000 people from 42 properties in just two days – the biggest evacuation in Greek history – although only around 1,800 guests in Rhodes were directly affected by last month’s fires.
Others told of how firefighters drained their pools and at one property, the Tui Blue Atlantica Dreams, how 4,000 were corralled into its vast reception – only 1,000 of them actual guests – before evacuation along the beach by sea and by road.
“Looking back, the good thing was that we did not wait until the fire was outside the resort, it did not create panic,” said general manager Haris Xanthis. His property at Gennadi reopened on 6 August.
“The biggest problem was the ash everywhere. We reopened with 30 guests. Now we have 1,000; if you asked 90%, they would not say there was a fire here.”
Xanthis has a simple message for guests and the rest of the industry: "You are casting a vote of confidence by coming here. It’s important for the local community."
Tui evacuated 8,000 guests, in total. Evangelos Georgiou, head of operations for its Co-Lab sustainability project in Rhodes, was one of those helping coordinate the effort. “You see here the importance of a package holiday because we have a whole infrastructure that solves the problem [for those guests],” he said.
Tui has another special interest in Rhodes – it houses the operator’s biggest-selling European property, and another with its greatest satisfaction score.
‘Safe and beautiful’
Guests arriving following the fires will still be very satisfied. Viewed from the air as you approach from the west, there is no landscape of scorched earth. Rhodes is a large island, 55 miles by 22 miles – 18% of land was affected by fire, mostly inland forests, with only two hotels – both on the coast – still closed.
The east coast has the best beaches and calm winds; consequently, most hotels are situated there. The wildfires spread east because of a combination of exceptional temperatures and the prevailing north westerly wind which had strengthened. A deadly, but rare occurrence.
Moreover, the drier east coast has sparser vegetation, so damage was largely halted by the coastal road preventing fires from spreading to beach properties. The scarring will take more time to heal in the pine forested interior, where the fires started and where locals estimate replanted trees will take 30 years to mature.
Visitors that take excursions to the mountain areas will see the damage, but it is patchy and although parts resemble a petrified forest, it is far from being a totally blackened wasteland.
Back on the coast, locals had feared the season would end just as it peaked, but the bounceback since the evacuations began on 26 July has been remarkable.
In the reception at the Atlantica Agean Blue hotel in Kolymbia, Tui team leader Ivan Campbell greets guests. “When you go south from here you can see what happened, but from Kolymbia to the north there is nothing that makes you feel there was a tragedy,” he said.
“A lot of guests have been concerned about the locals. I’m from Tenerife and I know how, on an island, people’s lives can be ruined. It was impressive how the locals helped; it made you feel we still live in a nice world.
“Our goal now is to make people conscious that Rhodes is safe and beautiful. It was challenging, it was sad, but it’s over. Business is back to usual."
