Grow Greek Tourism Online, Google’s ongoing project that aims to educate tourism professionals on the opportunities to grow their business through their online presence, announced a new cooperation with the Region of Crete at an event held in Heraklion on Monday.

Minister of Administrative Reconstruction Olga Gerovasili, and Regional Governor of Crete Stavros Arnaoutakis both spoke at the event, and applauded the cooperation.

It’s not GGTOs first time in Crete. The project actually started on the island in 2014, and Google’s experts have trained many tourism professionals here since. The project subsequently expanded to locations around Greece, including a course taught at the Athens University of Economics and Business. The program also appears to be making a real impact, with 81% of all seminar attendees reporting having seen direct results in their businesses. 

The seminars on their online education platform, which are free to all, have been watched by over 80,000 Greeks to date. On Santorini, their trainers helped tourism professionals improve their online presences by doing things such as adding their businesses to Google Maps and using 360-degree cameras to capture their businesses and add them to Google Street View. This year, professionals in Crete will get the same opportunity. 

A new study, done for Google by Oxford Economics, shows the importance of educating people on creating online presences. While previous research, done in 2013, suggested that by organizing tourism better online Greece could create as many as 100.000 new jobs, today that figure is estimated to be as high as 170.000.