Greece is among the top 10 winners of the new Global Beachfront Awards, which count the number of true beachfront accommodations in 109 countries around the world.

In the newly announced Global Beachfront Awards, Thailand won top spot with an amazing 1,250 true beachfront hotels and resorts, followed by the USA with 1,016, Mexico with 943, Spain with 736 and Greece with 576.

The list of the Top 10 countries includes two other rising stars in beach tourism, Philippines and Sri Lanka.

The new Global Beachfront Awards are issued by The Beachfront Club, a website that maps all beachfront hotels on the planet.

The awards are a measure of the number of true beachfront accommodation establishments a country offers, and include all levels from beach bungalows to luxury, 5-star resorts. ‘True beachfront’, by the criteria of this Club, includes only those hotels directly on a beach or oceanfront with no road or traffic between the rooms and the water.

“True beachfront is the first choice of beach-lovers worldwide” says website founder John Everingham, an Australian and long-term resident of Thailand. “Especially for those who travel halfway around the planet, and spend large sums of money seeking the perfect beach.” The website is designed, he says, to help people find beachfront hotels anywhere on the planet while avoiding the misleading advertising of hotels that pretend to be on a beach, when in fact they aren’t. “Old hotel brochures were often designed to leave out roads and make a hotel appear to be right by the sand. Today it’s still commonplace on websites,” he says. “The Beachfront Club allows users to avoid such misleading advertising.”