Planning / Flying or ferries to the Greek islands
Flying or ferries to the Greek islands
Should you fly or take the ferry to the Greek islands?
Where an island has no airport, the ferry is the only route: Poros and Tinos are examples on this site. Kefalonia and Naxos have airports, and we flew to both — Athens to Naxos on July 15, 2025, Athens to Kefalonia on July 8, 2026. Our boat crossings logged no fare, so this page compares no prices and makes no pick.
Most Greek islands have no airport, so for most of them the ferry is not the slower option but the only one. Of the islands this site covers, Kefalonia and Naxos have airports; Poros and Tinos do not.
We flew to both of the ones that do. Athens to Naxos was scheduled at 11:30 to 12:15 on July 15, 2025 — a 45-minute block on the booking, gate to gate, not a measured time. Athens to Kefalonia was scheduled at 12:50 to 13:55 on July 8, 2026, and we flew back on July 13. A scheduled block is not a journey time: the drive to the airport, the bag drop and the wait at each end sit outside it, and we logged none of those.
Our sea crossings are on the ferries page: a fast boat from Piraeus to Poros in July 2013, Tinos in July 2024, and Naxos to Ios and on to the mainland in July 2025. Conventional ferries carry cars and fast boats generally do not; the main routes run several sailings a day; and a ferry lands at a port in the town rather than at an airfield outside it. It is also slower, and more exposed to the weather.
On cost, this site will not pretend to a comparison it has not logged. The record holds one dated airline figure — a $114.73 Sky Express charge on July 10, 2026 — and that is a card charge rather than a per-seat fare: it does not tell us how many seats it covered, or what else was bundled into it. There is no ferry fare in the record at all. When both sides exist with dates attached, the comparison appears here and on what Greece costs. Until then, this page compares no prices and makes no pick between the two.
Common questions
No, and most do not. The ferry is the default way to reach the islands rather than the fallback. Poros is the example on this site: no airport at all, so the fast boat from Piraeus is the route.
Two of the islands this site covers have airports. Kefalonia has EFL near Svoronata, about an hour from Athens, with domestic connections and seasonal international flights. Naxos has one too — we flew in on July 15, 2025, scheduled 11:30 to 12:15, a 45-minute block gate to gate. Poros has no airport at all, and Tinos we reached by sea.
We cannot say from our own trips: we timed none of them door to door. The Naxos flight was a 45-minute scheduled block in July 2025, and the drive to the airport, the bag drop and the wait at each end sat outside it, unlogged.
This site cannot answer that from evidence yet. Our record holds exactly one dated airline figure — a $114.73 Sky Express charge on July 10, 2026 — and no ferry fare at all. That airline figure is a card charge rather than a per-seat fare: it does not tell us how many seats or what extras it covered. The comparison publishes when both sides of it are documented and dated.
Piraeus to Poros on a fast boat in July 2013, Tinos in July 2024, and Naxos to Ios and on to the mainland in July 2025. None of those crossings left a fare in the record.