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No frills Cruises between Greek Islands

As I understand it EasyCruise went out of business a few years ago. Does anyone know of any cruise line that uses the same business model, particularly in the Eastern Med/Greek islands? I did some reading on EasyCruise (in particular to their cruises of the greek islands) and their model sounds right down my alley. I love long port times, smaller offbeat ports of call and don't need many of the amenities offered on larger ships. I'd love to do some sort of cruise to the greek islands that is REALLY focused on the islands and not the ship. Does anyone know of such a company? Yes, sure I could use the ferries that ply the waters of the greek islands to do an island hopping type vacation, but EasyCruise seemed ideal. I've already posted this on CruiseCritic but basically got the answer "take a ferry and check into a hotel every night". I'm looking for a substitute for that.

Posted by
23573 posts

The answer is the same. There were a lot of problems and a lot of complaints about EasyCruise. The business model didn't work and so they are gone. But, if you really want to focus on the island then why would you not stay several days or at least night on each island?

Posted by
1078 posts

Check Varietycruises.com. We used them this year taking their "Classical Greek Cruise" the first week of June on the Harmony V. It is a 53m motor yacht that could get to islands that the big ships have to avoid, was in each port(except Hydra) the full day and offered excursions at Santorini, Crete, and Nafpoli to Mycenene. The ship has around 24 cabins, 2 meals a day, and our cruise had about 21 couples from the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. We had plenty of time to explore on our own, and the tours we took had very knowledgable guides. We took the early June cruise because the research I did indicated that the Agean can get pretty rough in the late summernot a problem with for the big guys, however, if on a small yacht(53m!) you could get very sick without the pills.
Finally, we were doing our cruse the same time they were having the floods in Germany and the Balkans, and that rough weather(not the rain) really churned up the Agean. The day before we got to Santorini, we were told that they had 11 of the large ships visit as it was too rough for any of them to get into or out of the Caldera for a couple of days.

Posted by
23573 posts

If they were looking for Easycruise, then the price of Varietycruises will be well out of their range. Easycruise was basically a floating Motel 6.