3 weeks in Greece October, 2022

A few things I have learned to get you started.
1) save your days in Athens until the end.
2) go as soon as possible to first island. First trip I had unconnected tickets in Aegean airlines for later in day. This time I had flight to Crete on same ticket.
3) Seriously consider focusing on one island group to simplify travel logistics. You can not easily fly as flights do not go between islands but require return to Athens. Ferries typically go within island groups.

Barbara,
My husband, adult son and I spent 24 days in Greece in April. We planned the trip ourselves, spending many hours in the process. We used RS books and Lonely Planet as well as RS tour forum comments. I booked all accommodations on Booking.com or Airbnb. Because of Covid I made sure the rooms had free cancellation at least several days before check in. We rented a car to drive to Delphi and Meteora and around the Peloponnese. We spent 2 nights on Santorini (very crowded) and 5 on Crete. We also rented a car on Crete. We had no issues driving in Greece.

Unlike Beth we like to start the trip with the big cities and end with low key. We flew from Seattle to Athens arriving early afternoon. I had booked a 2 bedroom, very roomy Airbnb so had a great place to land each day. I am always keyed up to start the vacation so a big city is perfect for me to start out with. We filled 3 days in Athens and had a great time. We ended our trip on Crete flying back to Athens the night before flying home to Seattle. We picked a lodging near the airport with transportation to and from the airport.

We really enjoyed Delphi and Meteora but they are quite a drive from Athens. Nafplio is generally highly rated by many but we had 2 very rainy days there so wasn’t a favorite for us. I am glad we did Santorini just because you have to do Santorini but was not a highlight of the trip. We did enjoy Crete. So much of your itinerary will depend on what you like to do. We love museums and archaeological sites but not just hanging out on beaches.

Our son traveled with us for only part of the trip and then he went to Naxos for a week. He loved Naxos but it was very laid back in April.

Be sure to factor in transportation time between islands because you can loose a lot of the day just moving between islands and as Beth noted if you want to fly you will need to most likely go back to Athens. I am not sure if it is typical but our ferry between Santorini and Crete ran 2 hours late and our son’s ferry between Naxos and Santorini was an hour late.

Have fun planning and you will enjoy Greece.

Pam

thanks so much for your imput- I will check out all the info...

Barbara, if you are planning the trip yourself, there is no shortcut for research. There is a ton of information in old posts on the forum and that is one good place to start. A map is another. Plot out where you want to go, then figure out how long it will take you to get from place to place after you see what a travel line looks like.

Three weeks seems like a long time but your wish list, while very interesting, is pretty spread out. You might find that utilizing short flights within Greece will be useful. But Corfu and Skopelos are way far apart.

Not knowing what other islands you want to see also makes it hard to help.

I might suggest that you look at flying to your furtherest destination (either north or south) when you arrive. i.e. if you are flying from the U.S. to Athens, go ahead and fly to Corfu on arrival day (if flights work out) - or to Skopelos. Or south if that is where you are going. Then figure out what happens next. You definitely could drive some of your wishlist, but you have to see where that is more advantageous, compared to how much time you have.

Remember that you lose at least 1/2 day in changing location and maybe more if you are driving, And I suggest you plan to end your stay where you plan to fly home from. Often that is Athens, but certainly not always.

As other members of the forum have already pointed out to you, even if you have 3 weeks you will have to carefully watch the travel times in order to optimize your trip.

Your choice of islands is interesting and a change from the usual Santorini and Naxos, however be aware that the island of Corfu is located in the Ionian Islands and Skopelos in the Sporades. These two islands are located at opposite extremes. If Corfu is directly accessible by plane from Athens, this is not the case of Skopelos which does not have an airport.

To get to Skopelos from Athens you need to take a flight to Skiathos, a taxi between the airport and the port, and then a ferry from Skiathos to Skopelos. Ferries are frequent and the crossing time is only about an hour but in October you may only have 2 or 3 flights a day to Skiathos. This means that the trip between Athens and Skopelos alone is likely to last a whole day and as much for the return. This represents 10% of the 20 days you have.

The same kind of problem will arise with regard to Ioaninna and Corinth which are also located in areas very far from each other.

My advice would be that you first look at a Map and that you reorganize your trip in order to optimize the routes, otherwise this trip will consist of traveling by car, planes, ferries, taxis and you will not have taken advantage of the places visited.

My advice to start on an island really had nothing to do with relaxing there first but rather optimizing time. You have three weeks while we only had two so may not be as important. If you fly the same day to your first island and save Athens for last like we did, you don’t have to spend another night near the airport like the second poster did.

JoLui’s post shows the difficulties of not staying within one island group. Fir my first trip to Greece, I started out wanting to go to Rhodes, Santorini, and Corfu. Then I figured out the transportation logistics and decided to stick to the Cycladic islands.

I agree with BethFL. We just returned from Greece. We flew directly to Santorini, with a layover in Zurich, from Boston. After 3 nights on Santorini, we took the 2-hour ferry from Santorini to Naxos. After 4 nights on Naxos, we flew from Naxos to Athens Airport. (30-minute flight). Then picked up a rental car to drive to Nafplion. We ended our trip with 4 nights in Athens, and flew home from Athens. So we didn't have to spend an extra night at the Athens airport. We really did maximize our travel time between places. We never felt like we wasted a day getting from place to place.

It really is important to check ferry schedules and flight schedules before you finalize your itinerary.

About trips only, by looking at the list of places you mentioned, and without counting travel times, visits or stays

The places you want to go can be divided into 2 parts.

The Athens, Corinth, Ioannina, Corfu part is easy to plan either starting from Athens or in the opposite direction from Corfu to Athens.

Rent a car in Athens and drive to Corinth then continue to Ioaninna. Then continue to Igoumenitsa (75km). This is the port from which you can go to Corfu. At Igoumenitsa drop off the car and take a ferry to Corfu, the crossing takes around 1h30. At the end of your stay in Corfu take a flight back to Athens.

Another solution would be to find a flight to Corfu when your flight arrives in Athens but I'm afraid it won't be easy to synchronize both flights, in October there are few daily ATH to Corfu flights. This is to be checked with Olympics or Sky Express and this would be the only possibility of leaving for your chosen islands directly when arriving in Athens, the island of Skopelos not being accessible directly by plane anyway (except by private jet like Meryl Streep and the Mamma Mia film crew)....

For the other part, Skopelos, either you fly to Skiathos and back, and take a ferry Skiathos-Skopelos or you go from Athens to Volos by car (about 350km) then from Volos you take a ferry to Skopelos and fly back to Athens from Skiathos

It's up to you to study the question. good luck!!

thanks everyone for all your input!!!!
it looks like we will only have 2 weeks, not three so I definitely have to make sure to use our time wisely.
are there any places that you would suggest tours as opposed to wandering and exploring?

The year before Covid, I spent 18 days in Greece in October. The first week of October I was on Crete, in Chania and Heraklion. There were no crowds but there were enough tourists that everything was open and lively. Then I took the ferry to Santorini. I arranged a driver from the port to my hotel in Firostefani. A lot of people got off the ferry there and it was a slow drive because of all the traffic from the port. On the way my driver told me it was the last week of the tourist season and he was heading home to Georgia until spring. It absolutely didn't feel like it, though. I was there for three days, there were one or two cruise ships in port every day, and crowds of tourists in the streets. Just about every restaurant required a reservation for dinner. Then I took the ferry to Naxos. It really felt like the season was over. I stayed in an apartment overlooking the beach. There was no one staying in any of the other apartments in the building (my landlady said I was her last visitor of the season), only a handful of folks on the beach during the day, none in the evening. Some of the tourist shops were already closed up. There were only one or two guided day tours available and no ferry tours - I had hoped to go to Delos, but the company told me they always close up for the year at the very beginning of October.

Then I flew to Athens . . . busy as always, but not overcrowded with tourist.

IT would help us to understand your rather disconnected destination list, if you would share more about WHY you have chosen these particular places? Are any of them due to family connections? Or due to a special landmark or historical site of importance that you have studied? Or is mainly because you saw a lovely photo or YouTube video online and thought Wow that looks nice!l We cannot help you unless you express your interests more clearly -- and hopefuly that will inspire you to do a bit of research yourself.

A quick visit to your local llbrary will provide you immediately (FREE) with a basic Guidebook that will organize facts for you, group the highlights of every area of Greece mainland & islands, tell you how easy/hard it is to get there, and give you a reality check. IF you are averse to printed matter, you can also get an overview of islands - by group - on a website like this - https://www.greektravel.com/greekislands/ - however, such links only give the plusses, but not maybe the drawbacks, such as: in October weather can be more iffy, in some isles things are definitely "closing down", local transit is cut back, shops and cafes shuttered etc.

Finally, we can't tell you what are "Must-sees" until we know more about what's important to you. Please share!

Thank you for this info.
My husband’s family is from Ionnina.
I watched “The Durrells of Corfu” and would love to see the island in person
Same for Skopelos (Mama Mia) a gorgeous island….
I understand that flying to and from Greece is best to and from Athens…..
So I tried to figure a way to do each…..

Well, Janet is a wealth of knowledge on Greece and generous in helping. However, in this case, I think knowing WHY you chose these areas is beside the point. You chose them and you are willing to spend the time to get from one to the other. The only reason to know why would be to ascertain if you can be persuaded to drop something and go somewhere else.

I do think you are going to have to do some study. Your places are interesting but spread out. And now that you only have 2 weeks instead of three, it may get tougher. JoLui has given you some good pointers about moving between them, but now it’s time for some research into flights, etc., and a breakdown of the actual number of days you have, a realistic look at the time it will take to get from from place to place, and how that fits together. Then come back with specific questions. Since we don’t know what you want to see other than the names of towns or islands, we don’t know if you should take a tour or not…..

I would only add that "Durrells of Corfu" was about a british family in Corfu in the middle of the Great Depression, before there was mass tourism. It was 90 years ago. Since then Corfu has been HUGELY changed -- package tourism and jumbo-jet flights from Britain & northern Europe for "AI Holidays" (All-inclusive) has resulted in building up of concrete "resort" areas dominating many of the beaches ... I understand the biggest challenge in filming "Durrells" was finding anyplace that was at all remote & village-like. I fear that you might be very let-down by the current Corfu look & feel -- of course there are many lovely views, YouTube videos give evicdence of that ... but also, a whole lot of bars showing soccer, and large numbers of people focussed on beaches, beer and shopping. Nothing wrong with that! We have to remember that for many in the UK, Greece is their Florida -- a place for sun & swims, not immersion in another culture.

So think twice about going there... and perhaps research what other isles might be less affected by 50 years of mass tourism. For example, in the Noorth East Aegean, Chios is amazing, and almost untouched by tourism ... However, do what you do, just b e aware that your TV dreams, including the Mama Mia thing, are changed dramatically by commercial opportunity. PS: The Ionian Islands are the farthest NOrth of any Greek isles, thus are cooler in the fall, and tend to have more rain earliler than other places... this website https://www.weatherbase.com/weather/city.php3?c=GR&refer= can help you compare. for Example, in October, Naxos has an a verage of 5 days of rain, Thessaloniki has 8 -- and Corfu has 11.

thank you , Janet for all your input.... I appreciate you taking the time to give me all this info....
I also found out that many places close after tourist season and I will have to look into that as well.....