The One Island Plan

Just as you can’t order everything you want on a restaurant menu, choosing to visit just one island instead of several is the easiest and in many ways the best way to experience Greece

Many people who travel to Greece want to see as many islands as they can in whatever time they have. Some book 2 or 3 nights on 4 or 5 different islands which is a lot of packing and unpacking and waiting for ferries. But others believe that less is more and by just going to one island you will have a deeper and richer experience than scratching the surface on several. I understand why you would want to visit many islands because they all look so beautiful and also there are those we are expected to go to because our friends and everyone we know who ever visited Greece went there. But even so just as you can’t order everything you want on the menu choosing one island is the easiest and in many ways the best way to experience Greece. You will have time to make friends, eat at a favorite restaurant more than once, see places that are not on the typical tourist map, and get yourself in tune with island life instead of being a tourist rushing from place to place to see it all.

The first thing to do is choose the island. Do you want a touristy island? (Yes even the most touristy islands have areas that are traditional where people go on with their day to day lives that may or may not have anything to do with tourism). Maybe you would like to go to a totally off the beaten path island. Most likely it is something in between where you can find a little (or a lot) of both. But once you have chosen the island you can read about it and decide where you want to stay, what you want to do, and where you want to eat, without thinking that’s one down, 4 more islands to go. See Matt's Greek Island Synopsis

If you have 10 days you can do a week on an island and 3 days in Athens and maybe a daytrip or overnight to somewhere on the mainland like Delphi, Meteora or Nafplion and the Argolis or even a day sail or a cruise to the nearby Saronic Gulf Islands.

How you arrange your trip is up to you. You can book it through a Greek Travel Agency who will be happy to work on an itinerary that doesn’t depend on multiple ferry connections. You can choose to book it on your own since there is less that can go wrong visiting one island than four or five. The information and the tools are all here on my website whether you want to use the Create-an-itinerary form and have the travel agency find the hotels and ferries and give you a price, or whether you want to use the recommended hotels on my Greek Island Pages or on my Hotels of Greece, and tie it all together using Ferryhopper and the taxis and transfer services on my website. Most of my island pages have tours, excursions and classes as does my Athens Survival Guide.

The one problem with the one island plan is that many people love the island experience so much that they come back the next summer, and the next and the next. It may take 10 years before they say “we really should visit another island” and add an extra week to their trip so they can do both. But as problems go this is not a bad one to have.

And I suppose it’s needless to say that if you have twice as much time you can do 2 islands.

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