How Grecotel got here
Grecotel has two birthdays and they say different things. A Cretan family opened its first hotel in Rethymno in 1975. The company called Grecotel was created in 1981, and half of it belonged to the German tour operator that would fill the rooms.
Founded 1981 · Rethymno, Crete, Greece · Last reviewed August 2026
- 1975
Out of olive oil
Nikos Daskalantonakis, from Rethymno and working in his family's olive-oil and soap business, opens the family's first hotel on the coast nearby. Crete at that point is mostly agricultural, northern Europeans are just beginning to arrive, and villagers are leaving to find work elsewhere. His argument is that tourism can be the alternative, and that Greece should be selling its food, its buildings, its landscape and philoxenia rather than competing on cheap sunshine.
- 1981
TUI takes half
The family forms Grecotel with TUI Hotels & Resorts, each holding roughly 50 per cent. The trade is clean: the Greek side supplies land, hotels and the knowledge of how to run them, and the German side supplies flights, travel agencies and a northern European customer base large enough to fill them through a season. It also turns a family's collection of hotels into a professionally managed chain, which most Greek hotel owners of the period did not have.
- 1980s
Crete, then Corfu
Expansion across Crete and then to Corfu's Kommeno peninsula, where the company gathers several neighbouring hotels, Corfu Imperial, Eva Palace and Daphnila Bay, into what works as one destination without making them identical. Corfu Imperial becomes the formal flagship: villas, waterfront dining, a recreated Corfiot village.
- 1990s
Across the map
Kos, Mykonos and the Peloponnese, and the shape of the strategy becomes clear. Rather than take a Greek-style resort abroad, which is what nearly every comparable company did, Grecotel goes deeper into Greece and tries to hold a position in every destination that matters.
- 2002
The company buys a farm
Agreco Farm opens to visitors near Adele outside Rethymno: 40 hectares of olive groves, vineyards, beehives, vegetable gardens and animals, with a traditional olive press, bread ovens, a chapel and a taverna. Guests bake bread, collect eggs and press grapes. For a hotel group it is an unusually literal way to connect the buffet to the island it is on, and it closes a circle back to the olive-oil business the founder came from.
- 2004
Athens, and the part that did not work
Ahead of the Olympics the group invests substantially in Athens hotels, on the reasonable expectation that the Games would make the city a year-round destination. The Greek financial crisis that followed a few years later, and the condition of parts of central Athens, made that a harder bet than it looked. The history is worth stating plainly: this is not an unbroken run of successful openings, and the group went through a genuinely difficult period after 2008.
- 2015
TUI sells its half back
On 3 July, TUI sells its 50 per cent stake to its Greek partner, reportedly for somewhere around 40 to 50 million euros, and says the decision is about concentrating on its own hotel brands rather than a judgement on Greece. After 34 years Grecotel is entirely family-owned again. The commercial relationship does not end: TUI keeps selling Grecotel holidays, it just stops owning half of them.
- 2017
LUXME
The group introduces LUXME, for Luxury Made Easy, its upscale all-inclusive tier: à-la-carte restaurants alongside buffets, premium drinks, children's dining, beach and pool service, and access to selected neighbouring properties. It is a response to the same shift in what European travellers wanted that produced Ikos two years earlier, arrived at from the opposite direction.
- 2023
The Dolli, opposite the Acropolis
After about seven years of planning and restoration, the group opens a 46-room hotel in a protected 1925 neoclassical building near the ancient centre of Athens, with a rooftop pool lined up on the Parthenon. A company that began in Cretan package tourism now runs one of the most intimate hotels in Athens, which is a long way from a beach resort and exactly the same strategy: sell Greece as the luxury.
What the dates leave out
A tour operator owned half of it
This is the fact that separates Grecotel from every other family company on this site. TUI was not a distribution partner that sent guests; for 34 years it owned half the business. It is the same instinct that runs through the Mallorcan chains, that whoever controls the journey rather than the bed holds the stronger hand, except here the tour operator got there first and bought in. RIU's long relationship with TUI is the closest parallel, and RIU stayed the senior partner in its own company.
It never left Greece
Iberostar went to the Caribbean, Barceló to the Dominican Republic, Meliá to Cuba, Ikos to Spain. Grecotel has stayed put: Crete, Corfu, Kos, Rhodes, Mykonos, the Peloponnese, Athens, Cape Sounio, Alexandroupoli, Larissa, Kalamata. For a company of this size that is genuinely unusual, and it is a choice rather than an accident. The proposition is Greece, so the growth strategy is more Greece.
The hotels are deliberately not alike
Ikos runs one tightly controlled concept everywhere. Grecotel does close to the opposite: a waterpark resort, a Mykonos hideaway, a formal Corfu flagship and a 46-room Athens mansion are all Grecotels. That makes the name harder to explain, because it guarantees Greek ownership and a quality tier rather than a specific experience, and it is also why the portfolio is more interesting than a chain of the same building. LUXME is one tier inside it, not the whole company.
Real Picassos in the restaurant
Amirandes, on the north coast near Heraklion, is built with reference to Minoan palaces: reflecting lagoons, stone and marble, courtyards, large pithos vessels, palace symmetry. Its Minotaur restaurant displays original Picasso ceramics, not reproductions. A Bronze Age reference, a twentieth-century artist and an all-inclusive plan in one building is about as Grecotel as it gets.
The view is the amenity
Cape Sounio sits on the Athens Riviera looking across the bay at the Temple of Poseidon, which is 2,500 years old and best at sunset. Rethymno's Creta Palace, which the company now treats as its symbolic home, is close enough to the Venetian harbour and old town that guests can use the town as well as the resort. The pattern is consistent: put the resort where the country is already interesting, and let that do the work.
Still the same family
Owned through the N. Daskalantonakis Group and now referring to its third generation, with no sovereign wealth fund, no global chain and no private equity behind it. Among European hotel companies at this scale that puts it in a small group, alongside the Mallorcan families and Couples in Jamaica.
Everything we read on Grecotel
Where the company's own materials disagree with each other, we print both readings rather than choosing the tidier one.