My Greek rental odyssey
Why I’m proud that the ‘Stanley Johnson loophole’ now has the full force of law
Twenty years ago, my wife and I built a house in Greece, on a wonderful wooded peninsula known as Pelion, bounded to the east by the Aegean Sea and to the west by the Pagasetic Gulf.
Realistically, many people who own properties try to rent them out for a few weeks a year. The money helps cover the running costs – which in our case include those of looking after the house, maintaining the swimming pool, tending the olives, repairing the road, and making sure the water supply is functioning.
Last year, of course, was special because in addition to all the normal preparations for the rental season, there was Covid to deal with.
On June 30, I received a warning email from Sarah of Real Holidays, Islington, who looks after the rental arrangements for us. “I have looked up the protocols as advised by the Greek government,” she wrote, and she went on to list a few of them.
All accommodation now had to follow enhanced disinfection and deep cleaning practices, paying special attention to “high-frequency touch points” such as door handles and elevator knobs. Meticulous cleaning and very good room ventilation had to take place between stays of guests. Fabric surfaces had to be cleaned with a steam appliance. There was plenty more of that sort of thing to consider.
“Finally, I think we also need to have a contingency plan in place should one of the clients contract Covid when they are at the villa,” she wrote. “This will require us either to cancel a subsequent booking or ensure it is cleaned to the standards advised by the Greek authorities.”
Wow! When I received Sarah’s email, I was – as the French put it – totally “bouleversé”. Overwhelmed. I reckoned I needed to get out to Pelion fast to put things in order.
There were only two problems. First, there was government guidance to avoid “non-essential” travel. Well, I said to myself, if heading out to Greece for three or four days in advance of the letting sea
son is not “essential” travel (and particularly so given the special Covid-related requirements listed above), maybe we needed a new definition of the word “essential”. If stopped at the airport in the act of boarding a plane to Athens, I was ready to argue my corner.
The second problem was that there were no planes. Though the UK hadn’t red-listed Greece, the Greeks had redlisted the UK in so far as they had banned direct flights from the UK to Greece. So how on earth was I to get out there?
I rang a Greek journalist working in London. She chose her words carefully. “It is quite true,” she said. “The Greek government has banned direct flights.”
When I put the phone down, I recalled that she had put special emphasis on the word “direct”.
Two days later, Wizz Air whizzed me off to Sofia with a more-or-less connecting flight to Athens. I say more or less because you actually go through passport control in Sofia on arrival and cross town to another terminal where you go through passport control again.
Whenever I arrive in Greece, my heart jumps for joy and it especially did so that sunny evening. I was whisked
through the formalities, swabbed and cleared in a matter of minutes. Before leaving the terminal in a hire car, I posted an Instagram video taken from the plane as we came in to land.
Four hours later, as I was sitting on the balcony of our villa looking out at the moonlit water of the Pagasetic Gulf, my phone rang. A journalist: what was I doing in Greece? How had I got there?
I have to say the Greek government could not have been more welcoming. The Greek minister of tourism went on TV to explain that my arrival, via Sofia, was totally legal and that they hoped very soon to open an air bridge between Greece and the UK. Michalis Mitzikos, the governor of South Pelion, joined me for dinner at Martha’s in Horto, the little village below our house, and we raised our glasses together with our hopes for a good summer. Back home, Grant Shapps, our own Transport Secretary, I learned, had been equally supportive on TV.
I left Pelion, after four busy days, to fly back to the UK. The first guests arrived a week later, all travel restrictions between the UK and Greece having been lifted.
Parliament, as I understand it, has now agreed that the “Stanley Johnson loophole” should now have the force of law in the sense that it will be totally legal to travel abroad for the purpose of getting a property ready for letting.
Cheers! Make that a double all round!
If stopped at the airport in the act of boarding a plane to Athens, I was ready to argue my corner