Heraklion is the economic gateway to Crete, with the main airport, the port, and a fabric of B2B businesses and premium tourism that has no equivalent elsewhere on the island. NovAI works regularly in Heraklion from our Ierapetra base, 90 minutes by road, on projects that demand premium web work, business-system integration and applied AI. The Kastelli outlook, the new international airport opening in 2028 with a capacity of 18 million passengers per year, changes the game for Heraklion hospitality and forces local players to raise the bar on digital visibility starting now. We are a French SASU based in Brest with operational presence in Eastern Crete. This dual base lets us keep French-agency rigour on quality while staying 90 minutes from the Cretan capital for in-person meetings. Our references cover four platforms in production, including Crete Direct which publishes 24000 SEO pages in 22 languages with strong editorial coverage of Heraklion.
Heraklion businesses tend to be more mature than the rest of Crete, and AI lands cleanly on three application grounds. First ground, 5-star hospitality. High-end hotels in Heraklion and along the north coast, from Gouves to Kokkini Hani, face strong digitalisation expectations from their international clientele. Direct booking on the property website rather than Booking, native multilingual coverage in EN, FR, EL, DE and often IT, digital pre-stay experience with online check-in, are now standards expected by 4 and 5-star guests. A clean PMS integration, a modern booking engine on Vercel, and a personalisation AI layer for stay recommendations form an investment that pays back from the first season through reduced OTA commissions. Second ground, wholesalers and B2B. Heraklion concentrates a significant share of Cretan wholesale trade in agri-food, wine, olive oil and professional equipment. These players have large catalogues, per-customer negotiated prices, and AADE myDATA accounting integrations. A B2B portal with authentication, custom pricing, Epsilon Smart integration and order automation replaces spreadsheets and email threads. Third ground, real estate in the city centre and the north. The Heraklion property market has tightened, with international buyers purchasing remotely, often from the UK, Germany or France. A real estate website with multilingual listings, lead qualification, virtual tour integration and follow-up email automation is a standard that few local agencies offer correctly today. Fourth ground, fine-dining restaurants. Heraklion has a recognised culinary scene with chefs exporting their image. Premium editorial site in Geist Sans plus Instrument Serif, online reservations, auto-translated QR menu, AADE myDATA compliance since December 2025, are all building blocks we install in a few weeks. For each project, we run a business-first scoping pass before writing a line of code, because understanding how a hotelier or a wholesaler actually operates is harder than aligning React components.