We are planning a trip to Greece (Crete, Santorin, Athens) in September. Our first trip to Greece - we are very excited!

We travel a great deal and usually do most of our travel planning ourselves but we are having difficulty figuring out the secrets of Greek ferries and flight schedules.

We are looking for a travel agent either in the US or in Greece who could book inter Greece air flights and ferries for our trip. Suggestions? Thank you.

Not to be discouraging, but for what its worth, my very limited experience (with a single travel agent in Greece) was that the prices she quoted me were no better than what I could find on the web.

You could book flights on Aegean or Olympic online. In my case the intra-Greece flight prices she quoted were no cheaper.

Also, for what it's worth, I found that it was cheaper to book my flight from Mykonos to Crete on Olympic -- on Aegean, online, I could only book this as two segments, whereas there seemed to be an implicit built in discount on Olympic (i.e., despite the connection through Athens, this was cheaper than the two tickets Mykonos to Athens and Athens to Crete).

Ferries are tricky, I think -- I couldn't see if I could trust the online schedules.

By the way, ferries are definitely cheaper, if you can tolerate uncertainty in your schedule. I don't know how frequently they run in September though.

My schedule was completely inflexible, so I opted to fly throughout.

We used Fantasy Travel out of Athens to book our trip this past September (wedding & honeymoon) and they were excellent. Our trip included flights to the islands. And though it's true, you may not necessarily save money on the flights by booking through an agent, I found it nice for someone else to take care of the details (particularly someone local - since they are there to assist you if there is a cancellation or problem.) Their web site is www.fantasytravelofgreece.com, and I worked with Litsa, [email protected].

Good luck - you're going to love Greece!

We also used Fantasy Travel for our trip to Greece last September...Dina was our agent and everything was flawless..
She arranged all of our hotels, ferry's, flights and transfers..No problems whatsoever..Quite impressed actually...

We did a three week visit to Greece this May and didn't book anything until we arrived. We visited 5 islands and the mainland. I would do it ourselves again in a minute - much more flexibility, better prices for hotels (we waited until we arrived on the island and then picked a couple we liked the look of and checked them out) and the ferries were easy to use (you can always find out the schedule when you get there, we didn't have any problems) I would imagine Sept would be about the same as May as far as schedule frequencies and busyness, etc. Just do some research beforehand so you know which islands you would like to visit and a general idea of where you would like to stay (which town) once you get to the islands. We visited Crete (flew from Athens) and then ferried to Santorini, Folegandros, Naxos, Mykonos and back to Athens for 4 nights and a two day tour. When we flew to Crete, we just walked up to the Olympic Airways counter and caught the next flight to Hania, it cost us half what we would have paid to prebook on the internet.