The short answer
Most Greece planning goes wrong in one place: a destination guide arrives before the destination is decided. So this page is sorted by the question you are actually asking, and there are only three of them.
If you have not chosen a destination, start with the comparisons. If you have a region but not a route, start with the itineraries and the ferry guide. If you already know where you are going, start at that destination’s own hub. Every link below goes to a page that already exists.
1. You do not know where to go yet
This is the decision the trip turns on, and it is the one most travel sites skip straight past. Greece is not one destination. It is six island groups and a mainland, and the gap between two of them is a day of travel.
Four ways in, depending on how you think:
- Two places, side by side. Our comparisons answer the question in its most useful form: not “is Naxos good” but “Naxos or Paros, and which for you”. There are more than fifty.
- By island group. The island groups is the geography lesson worth having first. Which group you pick decides your ferries, your budget and your weather far more than which island inside it.
- By the kind of trip. Trip types comes at it from the other end: couples, families, honeymoons, nightlife, food and wine, and five more.
- By one hard constraint. If something about your trip is fixed, start there instead: the best island for a first trip, the quietest islands, the cheapest, or which islands have an airport.
If your dates are the fixed thing rather than the place, read when to go before anything else. Half the islands change character between June and September, and some of them close.
2. You know roughly where, but not how the trip fits together
You have a region, or a flight you are about to book, and the question is now how many bases, in what order, and whether the crossings between them exist.
- Itineraries are the routes that already work, written end to end: a week, ten days, three weeks, and the road trips.
- Routes answers one crossing at a time. How you actually get from Athens to Santorini, or Thessaloniki to Meteora, and what it costs you in a day.
- Island hopping is the method, and the ferry guide is the thing to read before you commit to a route. In Greece the timetable decides the holiday.
- Which islands need a car settles a question that changes the budget, and it is not the one people expect.
- The map is worth two minutes if the geography is not yet in your head.
The honest version: the crossing is the constraint, not the island. A route that looks obvious on a map can need two ferries and an overnight, and that is what these pages are for.
3. You know where you are going
Now the destination guides earn their place. Every destination has its own hub, and each hub opens into what that place actually has: the sights, the beaches, where to stay, where to eat, and the day trips that are worth the boat.
Start at the hub rather than at a category. The hub is where we say what the place is for and what to skip, which is the part a listing cannot tell you.
The travel guide is the other half of this stage, and it is the part that gets read on the trip rather than before it: ferries you have missed, what closes on a public holiday, tipping, pharmacies, driving.
If you would rather answer questions than read
The planner asks how long you have, when you are coming and who is with you, then builds a shape from crossings we actually publish and links every stop to the page we wrote about it. It books nothing, and every place it names comes from our own lists.
It is the same material as the pages above, arranged by your answers instead of by our structure. Where our pages stop, it says so rather than guessing.