Thinking of visiting Santorini October 2015

I live in Oregon and it takes me around 24 hours to reach Santorini without stopping over anywhere on the way. Sometimes I fly out of Seattle and sometimes out of Portland. These flights go to Amsterdam, Switzerland or some other EU airport, but I've never stopped over in London. It's way too expensive for my budget and because of scheduling you have to spend the night to catch an EasyJet flight, which means spending more money on food and lodging. There are none that happen same-day that I'm aware of. I prefer to tough it out and wake up my first morning on the island. It's a serious grind, but I'd much rather recover from jet lag there than anywhere else I know. So it really depends on you and your style of travel, your budget and if you want to visit another country for a day or two on your way to Greece. If you decide to go through London with Easyjet you need to buy your EJ ticket as soon as you can because they don't go down in price, they go up. This means committing to travel dates. If you're not ready to do that you're better off doing what I do instead. If you search for flights from Athens to Santorini you should know that Aegean Airlines and Olympic Air have merged so the schedules are the same on either company's website.

As for where else to go, your closest options to Santorini are Ios, Naxos and Paros and they're all easily reached in short order from Santorini on a daily basis. I prefer Paros because I can also get to Antiparos very quickly by local shuttle boat. I like to rent a motor scooter and putt around the island. There's very little traffic and the scooters have automatic transmissions so they're easy to drive.

Where you first fly into is up to you, but from there I would check Sky Scanner (www.skyscanner.com) for budget flights as they search all the budget airlines in one place rather than going to each individual airlines' website. That might help you determine what city to fly into from Seattle. Maybe you check flights from London to Santorini and there's bad connections. Maybe you there are better connections from Amsterdam or Frankfurt, who knows (although I did a quick search for London and it does look like there's some direct options). With the amount of time you have, I'd consider Crete as this is such a large island you'd want about a week to really get to know it. It's also very close to Santorini. I think Santorini is also worth about a week as well, but I'm biased. I spent a month there and just absolutely fell in love with it.