Seeing as flights to Europe from Seattle in the summer are already expensive enough, we decided to blow all of our vacation time at once and tack on 11 days to Yacht Week in Greece. Especially with Labor Day being on the end of the trip, it made for a great opportunity to see as much as we could. Here’s our itinerary as it stood prior to arriving:
Flights:
When we know that we’re going to be in multiple cities, we tend to pick one hub to go into and out of from the States and then fly low-cost carriers everywhere else. In this case we flew into LHR on Delta. Just remember when you’re looking at trip into Europe you don’t have to fly from the states directly into the city you’re visiting. Usually it’s way more expensive that way.
The rest of our flights were thus:
We had absolutely no issues with the low cost carriers on this trip. The best piece of advice I can give you with European low-cost carriers is download their apps. Check in for every single flight in the time frame they tell you to. If you don’t check in online for RyanAir, for example, they charge you 75 EUR per person at the airport to print your ticket.
Lastly, these routes are not flown every day. Check the airline’s schedule to see when they go to places like Ibiza or Mykonos. Use a website like Skyscanner instead of Expedia to search for flights. I’ve found it has the most flights on it.
*this was our planned flight, but we didn’t book it and neither of us ended up on it (see below)
What we loved:
The order was perfect. Ibiza was a blast, Amalfi was stunning and historical, Mykonos was a great warm up to yacht week, and Santorini is pretty sleepy so it was perfect post-YW
The hotels: Ended up loving them all (see what we’d change for the Amalfi hotel)
Mykonos >>> Santorini (yeah I know shocking but so true)**
Kygo concert in Ibiza – bought the tickets WAY in advance online – it was incredible
SantAnna beach club in Mykonos during the day
Ravello on the Amalfi Coast
Paid tour of Pompeii (the guides will come up to you outside the parking lot)
Having a car to get to Amalfi and back to Naples (the roads are insane so make sure you’re a comfortable driver)
Day trip by boat to Capri from Praiano
**we heard that Mykonos has started regulating the number of tourists coming in each summer, so book early
What changed while we were there:
We didn’t end up doing Pompeii that first day in Amalfi – we did it on our way out on Thursday
Realized that our flight from IBZ-BCN wouldn’t give us enough time to get to the next flight which we bought separately, so even though we’d already paid for it, we bought an earlier flight out of Ibiza into BCN. It worked out because we ended up having to transfer terminals at BCN and we never would have made it.
We picked a hotel in Santorini and booked it during yacht week.
Staci ended up staying in Athens the day after YW and flew out to Santorini Sunday morning on Olympia Air – also a tiny airline. Totally fine.
Lainie stayed in Athens the morning after YW and went to see the Acropolis before heading to the airport for a late flight to Santorini.
What went wrong:
Our friends went to Santorini while we were on the Amalfi Coast and they took the ferry to Mykonos but one of them got off at the wrong island and had to wait hours for the next one. Pay attention on the boat
Our flight out of Santorini, even though it was the first one in the morning at 6:40 or something, got delayed 2 hours because of high winds on the island. We landed in Athens at the same time our next flight was supposed to take off to LHR. Unfortunately, the flight from Heathrow to Seattle was not connected to our flight from Athens, so if we missed the Heathrow flight we were in trouble. Fortunately for us, there were 12 other people on our JTR-ATH flight that had to made the ATH-LHR flight so Aegean airlines pulled us all aside and found a tall Greek man to literally run us through the airport because they were holding the next flight for us. So our advice is if your flights aren’t all on one ticket, be in Athens the night before you’re supposed to leave. The weather on the island is too unpredictable.
What we may have done differently:
The uber from LHR to STN was super expensive and took a while. That being said, the flights from LHR to IBZ all had a layover and were expensive that day. STN was direct and super cheap. If there’s a different way to do it we would recommend that.
Be back in Athens the night before our flight back to Seattle (for some reason the flight from ATH-LHR was $$$ and the one from JMK-LHR was only $$ so that’s why we did that)
Another day in Ibiza. I wish we had gotten in earlier the first day because the pool was fantastic and it all felt too quick.
Probably would have stayed in Positano or Amalfi on the Amalfi coast if we had booked way earlier. Everything was sold out or $500+ by the time we booked. All of the cities look like they’re close together on the map, and the bus is only 2 euro during the day, but cabs at night charge 30 euro one way if they have to leave the city they’re technically in. So, to go to dinner in Positano we had to pay 60 EUR in cab fares. So keep that in mind when you’re looking at hotel prices. Also realize that you don’t have to be on the beach in these towns. Being in town is just fine. You can walk everywhere because they’re such small towns.
Scorpios on Mykonos – super expensive and highly overrated
What we chose to skip:
Pompeii the actual volcano – there is a bus or a hike that’ll take you up onto the volcano but we did only the actual city
Naples – I wish we had time to check out the city, but we were both wiped out and we just wanted to get to our hotel that first day. Also, I’ve heard that driving in Naples is a complete nightmare so I didn’t want to deal with that.
For more details on each specific place we went, see the below links:
The Amalfi Coast - coming soon!