Athens / Santorini hotel recommendations

[Richie]

I don’t think Santorini is “.. a lovely island with plenty to do..”

[Jill Kinkell]

We were briefly on Santorini from a cruise ship. There were 5 moored! That’s a lot of people! We walked up the crazy steps/hill avoiding the poor mules, elbowed our way briefly at the top and sought sanctuary in a lovely little roof top terrace bar with great views and wi-fi. Beautiful setting sun as we cruised away. Definitely check the cruise port schedule.

[qc]

jj wrote:

@qc, if I were you, I would fly to Paros. The timing of the early ferries from Pireaus is grim, and you need to be at the terminal some time before departure. And the port isn’t a great place to spend the night, but you don’t want to have to travel from central Athens in the morning. The later ferry means you miss a day on Paros, so that’s not ideal either.

I almost always conclude that the best option is to fly to the Cyclades, but, like you, to take the ferry back.

Thanks – that is what we have decided to do.

[Richie]

jj wrote:

…The timing of the early ferries from Pireaus is grim, and you need to be at the terminal some time before departure. And the port isn’t a great place to spend the night, but you don’t want to have to travel from central Athens in the morning. The later ferry means you miss a day on Paros, so that’s not ideal either.

I almost always conclude that the best option is to fly to the Cyclades, but, like you, to take the ferry back.

This is spot on advice. I did stay the night at Piraeus for an early ferry. I just felt very tired later in the day.

[jj]

A few months after having been firmly rebuked by @PeteM for daring to suggest that a flight to Santorini needn’t mean a stay in Santorini (with his indignity spilling over to other threads), a flurry of news stories is putting my remarks into context.

Almost every UK national newspaper has run a story on overtourism in Santoerini in the past week. Outside the UK, publications from the USA, India, Australia and, of course, Greece, are warning people to stay away. Videos are being posted of 30-minute queues for Instagram shots and streets that resemble the turnstiles in Wembley. Restaurant seats with sunset views are already occupied by lunchtime. Prices resemble Cannes during the film festival.

The Greek Prime Minister has weighed-in by promising to reduce overcrowding on the island. A Santorini tourism official advised residents to stay at home to ease the overcrowding one day last week when more cruise ships than usual were expected to dock. The Greek tourism minister is urgently seeking solutions.

Advising someone with a flight to Santorini to explore other islands is no different from suggesting that a visitor to Venice should consider hotels on Giudecca rather than San Marco, or that a visitor to New York should consider Greenwich rather than Times Square.

Anyway, I had a fabulous time in the Cyclades this year. Not a crowd or a cruise ship to be seen; deserted white and azure beaches on which to lay my towel; sleepy tavernas with traditional dishes of local produce. I’m already booked for next year.

Ho hum.

[PIL]

Which one did you visit JJ?

[JDB]

As an older traveller who has been lucky enough to visit Santorini on various occasions this is a very thorny issue. Santorini and the setting of its capital overlooking the caldera is magnificent but this is somewhat outweighed by the devastation of mass tourism. The island is tiny and just cannot take 2m tourists a year vs its population of on 15,000. It’s no longer feels remotely Greek and Greek isn’t a language you will hear much in the streets. The place is overrun with people with zero respect for the natural environment, for the local inhabitants and no care for where they are or its history. They just want the photo that some influencer or magazine has shown them. You pay through the nose for accommodation and food and such locals who remain and opportunists know that this crowd doesn’t care and doesn’t know good food from bad. It’s Benidorm in a prettier setting. Mykonos is the same, possibly worse – at bit different today from the days of Shirley Valentine. Zakynthos and Kefalonia were once lovely as well.

The madness of crowds and power of social media keeps drawing people to the same incredibly limited number of places to the point where it’s throughly unpleasant and the locals are rightly rebelling. Personally, we prefer to stay in the next Santorini and its equivalents in other parts of the world and experience a quieter, more local style of life and unspoilt natural beauty but will move on when the hordes arrive. I guess we are lucky that most people don’t adopt that view. The Dubai, Maldives and Floridian magnets are terribly strong.

[jj]

PIL wrote:

Which one did you visit JJ?

A sleepy corner of Naxos for the empty beach. Naxos is a huge island, with some bits fully developed – albeit relatively sensitively as, to the best of my knowledge, it has no big hotels, all-inclusive resorts or buildings over three storeys except overlooking the harbour – and other bits remain just like the Greece of decades ago. Get away from the chora if you want to escape the crowds. To be fair, Naxos town is nothing like Santorini for crowding, but an alarming number of traditional restaurants there are being replaced by cocktail bars or some kind of reinvented fusion cuisine that I wouldn’t even feed to my dog.

We also went to Koufonissia. That island is sublimely beautiful but has been well and truly discovered; in peak season, it’s a small speck of rock with too many people. But it wakes up late in the season, and in early June it’s perfect. The Chora is immaculate, and, if you like traditional Greek cuisine, food standards on the island are incredibly high with little evidence of creeping Americanisation. You can catch a boat to Kato, walk for 30 minutes and literally be alone on the beach.

[pbcold]

jj wrote:

A few months after having been firmly rebuked by @PeteM for daring to suggest that a flight to Santorini needn’t mean a stay in Santorini (with his indignity spilling over to other threads), a flurry of news stories is putting my remarks into context.

Almost every UK national newspaper has run a story on overtourism in Santoerini in the past week. Outside the UK, publications from the USA, India, Australia and, of course, Greece, are warning people to stay away. Videos are being posted of 30-minute queues for Instagram shots and streets that resemble the turnstiles in Wembley. Restaurant seats with sunset views are already occupied by lunchtime. Prices resemble Cannes during the film festival.

The Greek Prime Minister has weighed-in by promising to reduce overcrowding on the island. A Santorini tourism official advised residents to stay at home to ease the overcrowding one day last week when more cruise ships than usual were expected to dock. The Greek tourism minister is urgently seeking solutions.

Advising someone with a flight to Santorini to explore other islands is no different from suggesting that a visitor to Venice should consider hotels on Giudecca rather than San Marco, or that a visitor to New York should consider Greenwich rather than Times Square.

Anyway, I had a fabulous time in the Cyclades this year. Not a crowd or a cruise ship to be seen; deserted white and azure beaches on which to lay my towel; sleepy tavernas with traditional dishes of local produce. I’m already booked for next year.

Ho hum.

jj are you a generally happy individual?

[pbcold]

jj wrote:

@PeteM, I’m sorry if I offended you. I travel to the Cyclades regularly and was trying to be helpful by having the kind of open conversation I’d have with a friend or colleague.

I won’t bother again.

Wow….so unhelpful and then bitchy when this was pointed out. If that is how you speak to your friends I suppose the tone should not be a surprise.

[AFKAE]

It wasn’t too bad in 1978 😉

I have been back a couple of times since, but the last time 5 years ago it was pretty busy…..in the shoulder season too.

[PIL]

jj wrote:

PIL wrote:

Which one did you visit JJ?

A sleepy corner of Naxos for the empty beach. Naxos is a huge island, with some bits fully developed – albeit relatively sensitively as, to the best of my knowledge, it has no big hotels, all-inclusive resorts or buildings over three storeys except overlooking the harbour – and other bits remain just like the Greece of decades ago. Get away from the chora if you want to escape the crowds. To be fair, Naxos town is nothing like Santorini for crowding, but an alarming number of traditional restaurants there are being replaced by cocktail bars or some kind of reinvented fusion cuisine that I wouldn’t even feed to my dog.

We also went to Koufonissia. That island is sublimely beautiful but has been well and truly discovered; in peak season, it’s a small speck of rock with too many people. But it wakes up late in the season, and in early June it’s perfect. The Chora is immaculate, and, if you like traditional Greek cuisine, food standards on the island are incredibly high with little evidence of creeping Americanisation. You can catch a boat to Kato, walk for 30 minutes and literally be alone on the beach.

Glad you had a good time. Naxos is our favourite too. Koufonisia is becoming more popular with Greeks and instagram does not help with all the publicity! Unfortunately another island ruined 🙁

[JDB]

AFKAE wrote:

It wasn’t too bad in 1978 😉

I have been back a couple of times since, but the last time 5 years ago it was pretty busy…..in the shoulder season too.

Those were the days! The main street wasn’t paved and to the extent that cruise ships came to the caldera, the only way up to town before the cable car was on foot or by donkey so that excluded most Americans. It’s made me nostalgic and prompted me to get ahead and make the ταραμοσαλάτα and μελιτζανοσαλάτα for tomorrow. Cheating on the γιαούρτι σαλάτα /τζατζίκι by getting the excellent watercress version from Ocado.

[AFKAE]

JDB wrote:

AFKAE wrote:

It wasn’t too bad in 1978 😉

I have been back a couple of times since, but the last time 5 years ago it was pretty busy…..in the shoulder season too.

Those were the days! The main street wasn’t paved and to the extent that cruise ships came to the caldera, the only way up to town before the cable car was on foot or by donkey so that excluded most Americans. It’s made me nostalgic and prompted me to get ahead and make the ταραμοσαλάτα and μελιτζανοσαλάτα for tomorrow. Cheating on the γιαούρτι σαλάτα /τζατζίκι by getting the excellent watercress version from Ocado.

Sleeping bags on the beach. Oh happy days! Making your way back from the bar to your spot, trying to avoid tripping over semi comatose (mostly Scandinavians) who hadn’t quite made it back!

[jj]

@PIL, Koufonissia isn’t quite ruined: there is a narrow window between the sea warming and the crowds arriving when it can be enjoyed in both warmth and quiet. Many of the restaurants have been in the same family for years – the butcher runs a grill, the fisherman a seafood place, for example – and menus vary with what has been caught or grown that day. The more touristy places don’t open until later in the season, and the beaches are still blissfully free of sunbeds. The town is full of trendy boutiques, but many of the goods on sale are genuinely Greek.

I couldn’t imagine visiting in August, though.

[ChasP]

Santorini is a bucket list destination – its on mine

Like 9 out of ten places on the list its probably over crowded and over priced
Most of the places that were on my Bucket list are in the “glad I went but I’ll not go again” category – unless I have a new partner 🙂

[JDB]

ChasP wrote:

Santorini is a bucket list destination – its on mine

Like 9 out of ten places on the list its probably over crowded and over priced
Most of the places that were on my Bucket list are in the “glad I went but I’ll not go again” category – unless I have a new partner 🙂

Sounds like time to revise the bucket list! I can’t say I have ever had a bucket list – it sounds awfully morbid. There are so many incredibly ‘wow’ places around the world that can be enjoyed peacefully with a partner at much lower cost. A partner might be much more impressed with the effort of researching somewhere more special, more memorable than where some influencer once went. Why go to places because everyone else is going there? Why not go to the places the influencers and their like will be going in a few years time?

People have mentioned other islands in the Cyclades that might be the next Santorini or Mykonos but there are lots of others in other island groups. Lemnos is beautiful, as is Mytilene/Lesbos. Also not too far away, I have been totally amazed by Serbia. Further afield, some of the sights in China are worthy of any list but they are nothing like as busy as Santorini despite huge domestic tourism. The Ice Festival in Harbin is unique and unforgettable, some parts of the Great Wall and more. There are parts of Argentina which are the most beautiful natural sights we have ever seen and can be enjoyed virtually on your own.

Anyway, each to their own!

[LD27]

Like @JDB I’m an older traveller and can remember Greece from travelling there in the 80s and 90s. We were fortunate to visit Santorini, Mykonos and other islands before the hoards arrived. I can still remember hiring a boat to take us from Mykonos to Delos. We spent the day there and were the only people on the island. We took our own food and drink as there were no facilities. Such an amazing experience sitting by the Lions alone. When visiting Knossos and even the Parthenon (which I think had no barriers) there were only a few other visitors. I can only imagine what these places are like now and I won’t be returning.

About 10 years ago towards the end of September, we were travelling around the smaller Greek islands again and had booked a few nights in Santorini in a small local hotel. We were so shocked. There were so many people and it was so noisy. So different from how we remembered it and the other islands we had visited on our trip. We spoke to the hotel and explained how we felt. They helped us with the ferries and we decided to curtail our stay and leave the next day for Sifnos and then after a couple of days to Serifos. That was such a good decision.

We have also discovered Serbia (last year) and have since returned. A fascinating country not yet overrun by tourists.

To echo @JDB. Each to their own!

[masaccio]

What’s Santorini like in the winter? Does off season keep the hoards away and return it to somewhere nice to visit or does it just reduce it from bonkers to moderately horrible?

[PIL]

masaccio wrote:

What’s Santorini like in the winter? Does off season keep the hoards away and return it to somewhere nice to visit or does it just reduce it from bonkers to moderately horrible?

From November to March expect nobody around apart from very few locals. Also, you will not get reliably good/moderate weather.
Best times to visit is in May and mid-late September in my opinion (the latter is what I would recommend more than the former).