Greek Lens is where our love for traveling and our love for Greece meet! We help travelers to experience Greece through the lens of our eyes. We are contemporary thinkers and we don't want to do things in the mainstream way .We want to express ourselves more through our work, and we want to create more meaningful services. We are travelers, entrepreneurs and most importantly community members.Thus, we want our projects to be sustainable both for our communities and for us.
We start small, with an ambition that this independent project can grow bigger, involve more passionate Greeks and create a unique space for honest hospitality expression. It is meant as a space where individuals can be true to themselves, express their heritage and live a better life.
We don't do tourism as usual. We are part of a generation that wants to improve, we challenge our sector's norms and we stay true to what we believe.
We want to make your time in Greece as enjoyable as possible, and to do so we will bring you in contact with incredible food, crafts and arts, as well as the people who make them. By supporting them, we create stronger local communities and we allow more locals to prosper.
Founder, Experience designer, Foodie, Traveler
IT crowd, Dancer, Earth's element
This project is dedicated to:
This project would not be here, without the help of the following people:
Traveling can be a transcendental experience, either by allowing us to connect with more humans, or from the way that we experience ourselves in a completely new environment. Hospitality has been an integral part to Greek culture throughout our history, and it is something that we learnt from home. In my mind, hospitality bears the values of respect, offering and understanding.
But in countries with economic troubles that welcome wealthier clients, the tourist industry has completely redefined (sic) the concept of hospitality. Local cultures are decreased to easily digestible parts. Parts of the city “are not to be seen” and tourists occupy specific neighborhoods. At the same time, the workers of tourism are nothing but pawns in fear of the eternal Client Damnation, while the management tries to squeeze all drips of profits. After ten years of work in tourism I have seen way too many talented workers being underpaid, underappreciated and unable to express their true character, with their opinions and emotions being deemed unimportant.
Currently, many of the workers of the tourism sector are forced to:
They can't leave their jobs because unemployment is enormous and there are poorer workers looking for that terrible job. By the time workers can leave the sector, they do, as they search for something less exploitative.
BUT There is something keeping some of us still here, at least the ones of us that had the choice to leave and didn't. We like meeting, talking and interacting with people from all over the world. We love introducing people to our culture, and we love even more to learn from them. We are good on what we do and we want to continue doing it.
Greece is our home and our communities are here. We won't leave! We will create the conditions that we deserve for us and our people. We can do our bit to improve tourism by connecting conscious travelers with initiatives, products and services that sustain and improve our communities. We can and we will break the circle!