Service Quality: Tourism & Dining

Summary — what the data shows

1. Pressure on infrastructure is rising. Passenger traffic grew — between 2016 and 2025, while hotel beds grew only —. Tourists per bed went from 23.1 to 28.8. Demand outran infrastructure.

2. The decline is in hotels, not in dining. In hotels, service complaints went from 19% (2017–2021) to 31% (2022–2026) and cleanliness from 17% to 22%. In dining the composition of complaints is essentially flat (service 34%→38%, food 40%→40%). A taverna kitchen absorbs volume; a hotel's day-to-day service does not.

3. Spending is rising; price complaints are not. Dining spend per visitor rose from €98.9 (2021) to €144.3 (2025) in current prices. Price complaints stay low and stable: 13% of negative dining reviews in both periods, 4%→7% in hotels. What visitors record negatively is the service, not the cost.

4. The star upgrade did not deliver a better experience. Beds in 4–5 star hotels went from 24% of the total (2016) to 51% (2025) and 1–2 star units halved. Over the same period service complaints rose. Star category is an attribute of supply, not of experience.

5. The hotel–dining gap has closed. Historically hotels drew fewer service complaints than restaurants (ratio 0.38–0.73 over 2018–2021). Since 2022 the ratio has risen to 0.79–0.97: hotels have almost caught up. Because both sectors experience the same growth in Google usage, this ratio is a robust indicator.

What visitors themselves say

We collected — negative Google reviews (≤3 stars) from — Zakynthos businesses — hotels and dining separately — and classified them by theme: price, service, food, cleanliness, crowding.

How it was done. Reviews were retrieved from Google Maps via SerpApi, sorted by lowest rating so that every year is covered evenly — chronological paging would return almost exclusively recent reviews. It used 243 API calls (~16 reviews per call). On the free tier of 250 calls/month the cost was €0; on a paid plan ($75 / 5,000 calls) it would come to $3.65 — about €3.35. The code is public and the measurement is reproducible.

The question is not "how many complaints" — their number rises every year simply because there are more tourists and more Google users. The question is how their content changes: if visitors increasingly complain about service or about price, that is a quality signal independent of volume.

The wider context — where else the money goes

The above measures what happens inside the Zakynthos market. Three further sources show what is changing in the behaviour of those who feed it. None of them concerns Zakynthos exclusively — this is stated explicitly in each case.

All-inclusive is gaining ground in the British market. Britain is the island's main market. According to ABTA Holiday Habits, 33% of those who booked a package did so specifically because they wanted all-inclusive, up from 28% the previous year, while 62% of British travellers chose a package (77% among families). The same research records that 57% intend to cut back on eating out because of living costs. INSETE documented back in 2014 that under the all-inclusive model a large share of spending stays inside the hotel.

Supermarkets are growing; dining is not. Nationally, food retail turnover (NACE 4711 — supermarkets) rose +5.5% in Q2 and +4.6% in Q3 2025. Over the same period, in food service (NACE 56) ELSTAT recorded −1.9% nationally in Q1 2026 — and −5.2% in Zakynthos, worse than the national average. Note: Q1 is off-season and accounts for only 3.5% of the island's annual dining turnover; on an annual basis turnover is rising.

Ionian households spend below the average. In ELSTAT's 2024 Household Budget Survey the Ionian Islands Region sits at 92.0 against a national average of 100. Spending on "restaurants, cafés and hotels" rose +6.5% nationally. ELSTAT publishes this category at national level; for the Zakynthos picture we have prepared a template questionnaire.