No, despite what people say, it is not tour operator sabotage, of course in the real world financial gain will always be a motive, so if some countries/airports/tourist boards offer incentives to send people there,there will always be a bias. It has always been a complaint that the Greek Government does not help tourism enough in terms of subsidies etc .The tourism crisis is all over the Med and the reasons are too many to list here, but not least is the way the Easyjets of this world have changed the way people holiday, the old 2 week holiday on the beach is becoming a thing of the past as people look for more specialist holidays and take several long weekend breaks to the cities offered by these airlines.
There has been an effort made to get a no frills airline to operate to Corfu but as they want guaranteed all the year business that Corfu cannot support, so it will not happen in the near future. An alternative would be for SOMEONE to charter a plane... who is going to commit to that much money?( which is what charter means.)
We are very dependent on the direct charter seats offered by the tour operators as seat onlies for people to be able to put their own DIY package together (and from many useful regional aiports too). I too saw this change direction 10 years ago and also offer independent holidays in simple self catering properties: Travel with Friends.

We are in the same line of thinking bookworm we live in San Stefanos also and would like to keep the village alive they deserve a better deal than they have been dealt by the "big boys". We can work together and revive things i hope-----

Billiz,

We will be back in San Stefanos in August (staying with Nondas again) - perhaps we could get together? There must be a good way of advertising independent accommodation providers. We finally managed to get picked up by Google but it was a long, hard slog and it's difficult to know where else to advertise; supermarkets will only accept ads for 'things for sale' and newspaper advertising is costly. The other problem is that I think people can be nervous about making their own independant arrangements - I know I was, the first time we did it.