How many languages does your property's website need?

The question usually arrives like this: “should we do it in German too?”. And it is usually answered by feeling: someone you know did it, or a German guest complained last year, or it just seems right.

It is one of the few decisions about a website that can be made with numbers. Let us look at them.

The first number overturns the most common assumption

The assumption is “everyone speaks English, so English is enough”.

The Eurobarometer on Europeans and languages, with fieldwork in September and October 2023 and publication on 21/05/2024, measures that 47% of Europeans speak English as a foreign language. 59% can hold a conversation in some foreign language, not necessarily English. After English, the most widely spoken foreign languages are French at 11%, German at 10% and Spanish at 7%.

Read the 47% the other way round, because that is where the point is: more than half of Europeans do not speak English as a foreign language.

One qualification I owe you, because otherwise the number claims more than it is entitled to. The 47% covers the general population of the European Union aged 15 and over. People who fly somewhere on holiday are on average younger and better educated, and the same survey finds that among 15 to 24 year olds the share speaking at least one foreign language reaches 79%. So the real English coverage among your guests is higher than 47%. The argument is not “English is not enough for anyone”. It is that “everyone speaks English” does not hold as an assumption, and how far it fails to hold is answered by your own figures, not by European ones.

And “I speak English” is not the same as “I am comfortable reading a cancellation policy in English”. A guest who orders coffee in English without difficulty may well not want to risk a four hundred euro deposit reading terms in a language they do not fully command.

The second number says who arrives

The Bank of Greece published the 2025 figures on 07/05/2026. Total inbound traveller flows were 43,311.9 thousand, up 6.4% from 40,693.9 thousand in 2024, and travel receipts were 23,626.8 million euro.

Be careful with that number, because for a property it is not the right one. The same release notes that 12.3% of the total is cruise passenger flows not collected through the Border Survey, roughly 5.3 million. And that 80.8% of cruise passengers were transit visitors, with an average of 1.5 stopovers at Greek ports. People who sleep on the ship.

The base that concerns you is the Border Survey, that is 37,981.1 thousand travellers, and that is also where the country figures below sit.

The large markets, in thousands of travellers:

Germany is the country’s largest market, and it is growing at 10.2%. The United Kingdom is second. Together they account for almost eleven million travellers.

What the combination gives you

English naturally covers the British and the Americans, roughly 6.4 million travellers, plus those from other markets who are comfortable in it. It does not cover the rest.

German covers, in their mother tongue, the single largest market the country has. Add Austria and the German speaking part of Switzerland and the number grows again.

That is why the usual correct answer for a Greek property is Greek, English, German. And it is exactly why you should not accept it because I said so.

Your own numbers beat the national ones

The Bank of Greece figures describe the country. Your property is not the country.

A property in Halkidiki has a different mix from one in Santorini, and a city hotel in Thessaloniki a different one from a beachfront property in Crete. There are areas where the third language is not German but Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian or Polish, and you already know it from your own books.

Three numbers you already have, which answer this clearly:

Where your bookings came from over the last two years. Not just last year. Two years, so that one good season in one market does not mislead you.

Where your website traffic comes from. Country of origin is one of the more reliable figures an analytics tool gives you, without being exact: it is derived from the network address, so VPNs and privacy relays blur it. At country level and over time, though, the picture holds. Persistent traffic from a country you do not cover linguistically is people arriving and not understanding.

Which language people write to you in. Email and messages on booking platforms. If they write in broken English with German syntax, you know what is missing.

When all three point at the same country, you have your answer. When they disagree, the bookings win.

Where adding languages stops

Translation is paid once. Maintenance is paid forever, and that is where almost everyone stumbles.

Every price change, every new room type, every change to the cancellation policy, every new captioned photo has to pass through every language. With three languages, one change is three jobs. With five, five.

And here is the part that actually costs: a language that is not kept current is worse than a language that does not exist. The German page with last year’s prices is not incomplete, it is wrong. The guest reading it thinks they are reading today’s price, books, and the problem shows up on arrival.

The rule I would suggest: add a language only if you can commit to updating it alongside the others. If you cannot, the fourth language is not an investment, it is a future complaint.

And the language you will never translate into

The previous section leaves a hole, and it is fair to name it.

If you stop at three languages, the Polish, Czech, Israeli and Korean guest is left outside. You are not going to translate the site into ten languages, and you should not.

This is where an assistant on the page genuinely helps. It takes a message in whatever language the visitor writes in, answers in the same one, and knows what you have told it about the property: what time check in is, whether there is parking, how far the beach is, whether you accept dogs, what happens with the keys when someone arrives at midnight. It can cover the area too, meaning where to eat well, what is worth seeing, how to reach the port without a car.

It is a service we already offer, and one we use in our own products.

What it does not replace, and why it is not the answer to this article’s question

It would be easy to sell you the assistant as the solution to the language problem. It is not, for three reasons you should know before deciding.

The search engine reads the page, not the conversation. The German searching in German will find you through your German page or not at all. The assistant serves whoever already arrived. It brings nobody.

The terms have to exist in writing. Nobody commits four hundred euro because a chat told them so, and you do not want a dispute about what the assistant said. The cancellation policy stays as text on the page, in every language you support seriously.

It answers whoever asks. Most visitors do not ask. They look, they do not understand, they leave. The assistant does not catch them.

So its right place is clear: the assistant is the fourth language and beyond, not the third. It covers the tail of languages that are not worth translating into, and answers questions the page could not anticipate. The three languages that sell, you write.

If this is of interest for your own property, see what we do with artificial intelligence or write to us. It is built on your own details, not on generic answers.

What needs care in the build

A separate address per language. Google recommends a different URL for each language version rather than switching by cookie or browser setting, and warns that otherwise it might not find and crawl all your variations. Beyond search, there are two reasons that depend on no engine at all: a page that switches language with a button without the address changing cannot be sent in a message in a specific language, and cannot be used in an advert targeting one market.

Declare which page corresponds to which. It is worth telling search engines explicitly that the Greek and German pages of the same room are the same content in two languages, so each visitor is shown the right one. Google recommends this without requiring it: it states plainly that translated versions are not treated as duplicates unless the main content is left untranslated, and that it may find them on its own anyway. Declaring makes the outcome predictable rather than likely.

Do not mix languages on one page. The half translated page, with the heading in German and the terms in English, is the worst outcome: the visitor does not know what they have understood.

For cancellation terms I would use a human, in every language. No law requires it: European and Greek consumer law asks that terms be clear and comprehensible, it says nothing about how the translation is produced. But it is the text that will be read carefully and the only one that can end in a dispute, which makes it the worst place to economise.

And a test you can run today

Open your site in the language you are considering, using your browser’s automatic translation. It is not a solution, it is a diagnosis. Read the rooms page and the cancellation policy.

If the automatic translation reads clearly, perhaps you need that language less urgently than you thought: the visitor can do the same thing. If it produces confusion, especially in the terms and the prices, you have just seen what part of your market reads today.

Either way, the decision stops being a feeling.

Sources

• Bank of Greece, “Developments in the balance of travel services: 2025”, published 07/05/2026.
• European Commission, Special Eurobarometer 540, “Europeans and their languages”, fieldwork September and October 2023, published 21/05/2024.
• Google Search Central, guidance on localized versions of pages and on multilingual sites.