The installation of new contactless automated ticket vending machines at the main entrance of the Acropolis of Athens presents visitors with one more option of how to buy their tickets. This is expected to help curb long lines that form outside the monument during peak season.
The new service, implemented by Greek paytech Cardlink and funded by Visa, will significantly facilitate access and improve the experience of visitors to the site, as they can avoid long lines and pay for their tickets with their cards, phones, or smart watches, an announcement said on Thursday.
Besides the ones at the Acropolis of Athens, more ticket vending machines are being installed at the entrance of three additional popular archaeological sightsees in Greece: ancient Olympia, Epidaurus, and the Archaeological Museum of Delphi.
A total of ten machines will gradually be made available by Cardlink and Visa at archaeological sites across the country in what is viewed as “a flagship project that will enhance the experience of thousands of tourists and help in the digitalization of the country’s most-visited sites,” AMNA notes.
Certified options for buying tickets to the Acropolis of Athens
The installation of ticket vending machines at some of the country’s most emblematic archaeological sites comes a year after Visa’s agreement with the Greek Ministry of Tourism to provide data on tourism spending trends. This also comes only weeks after the successful delivery of the second project under the “Visa for Athens” initiative, aimed at the regeneration of urban projects in Athens, comments Nikos Petrakis, the manager at Visa Greece.
Admission tickets to the Acropolis of Athens and to the rest of the formerly mentioned attractions where ticket vending machines have been installed, can also be bought at traditional ticket offices, through B2B ticketing, and online from hhticket.gr.
The latter is the official booking website of the Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development (HOCRED), which supplies tickets to a total of twenty-eight Greek archaeological sites and museums.
Measures against overcrowding on the Acropolis of Athens
Thousands of visitors wait in lines at the entrance of the Acropolis of Athens every day. The world-famous monument that overlooks the city of Athens attracts over twenty thousand visitors per day during peak season.
HOCRED has recently warned tourists against misleading “Skip the line” ads which claim to be providing shortcuts for faster access to the entrance.
In the meantime, Greece is underway to implement a series of new measures in an effort to control the unprecedented overcrowding at the Acropolis.
These will include caps on the numbers of visitors from September, allocating them time slots to access the 2,500-year-old monument.
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