Boat arrivals into Crete, before and after Covid-19

In this post we are looking at boat traffic into Crete and how it changed during the course of the pandemic.
We are using public data, available from the Greek government, analyzed and plotted in different ways.

Boat passenger traffic into Crete and Chania, 2019-2020

In the first plot we have boat passenger traffic into Crete and Chania. Each bar is a measure of how many passengers arrived into Chania (Chania and Souda arrivals) and Crete (Kissamos, Chania, Souda, Rethymno, Heraklion, Sitia) by boat. The data is summarised by week, where each bar is a sum of arrivals in the previous 7 days.

We can see how the first lockdown, in March 2020, brought down passenger traffic to almost zero. Then from May, and more so from June, things started easing up and more and more people were arriving into Crete by boat, with a good peak in the highest point of the tourist season, in mid-August.

Then by October passenger traffic dropped dramatically, especially for Chania, and in November, with the second lockdown, it went down to almost zero again. From January this year, there seems to be a very slight increase, especially for Chania arrivals.

Boat vehicle traffic into Crete and Chania, 2019-2020

The second plot shows the same time-span, 2019, 2020 and January 2021, again plotted by week, but this time for vehicles arriving into Chania and Crete.

The general pattern is the same as for passengers. However, we can notice that the fluctuations are not quite as wild as for passengers. This probably reflects the fact that there is still a baseline stream of commercial vehicles arriving during lockdowns, and even in peak tourist season there is only so much room for cars on the ferries.

Note: The plots above are interactive. Hover, pan, zoom and click on the legend to mute the corresponding data.