Single crystals of GaInTe2 were grown from a melt and characterized by various experimental techniques, such as x-ray diffraction, x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and electrical and photoluminescence (PL) measurements. Our investigation evaluated important parameters of this challenging material. In particular, we studied here for the first time the electronic structure, the excitonic effects and the impurity bound states of GaInTe2, by means of XPS and by analysing dependences on the temperature and the excitation intensity of the PL spectra.