Santorini Wedding and Greek Island Honeymoon: How to Combine the Islands

Planning a wedding in Greece and thinking about using the trip to see more than one island on your honeymoon?

It can work beautifully. Santorini, Mykonos, Crete, Rhodes and Ios don't feel like different versions of the same holiday. They have different landscapes, beaches, food, atmosphere and pace, and that contrast can be one of the best reasons to combine them.

Just don't let the map fool you. The islands may look close together, but the real itinerary is shaped by the sailings available on your dates, the season and how much time you actually have once the wedding is over.

Starting with Santorini

If you're having a civil wedding on Santorini, it makes sense to use the island as your starting point and continue elsewhere afterwards.

Mykonos, Crete and Ios are all practical islands to consider. Ios can mean a relatively short onward journey. Rhodes is further away and getting there can be more involved, but that's not a reason to dismiss it. Several clients of YachtWedding — a former travel company specialising in destination weddings — combined Santorini with Rhodes, and if your itinerary has enough room, Rhodes is worth considering precisely because it gives you a very different island experience.

One of its coordinators lived in Athens and travelled to Santorini to organise weddings. The practical lesson from that experience is simple: check the actual connection for your dates first, then build the next hotel stay and transfers around it.

Ferry crossing times and the number of sailings vary by operator, vessel, date and season. Outside the peak summer season, some services may run less often or only seasonally. Building a honeymoon around the assumption that “there will definitely be a ferry” isn't a particularly good plan.

Leave enough time around the wedding

The wedding itself also takes up part of your stay on Santorini.

At the time, the team could handle the Santorini arrangements on a tight three-day schedule, with a visit to the local municipal office on a working day after the wedding. That doesn't mean the same timetable applies to every couple today. Before you commit to the next leg of the trip, confirm the current process that applies to your own wedding.

On top of those three days, the team left one extra working day as a buffer. The reason was wonderfully mundane: there could be a power cut at the office, the computers might not be working, or some other operational problem could get in the way. If your ferry, hotel and next transfer are all fixed around that appointment, a small office problem can turn into a much bigger itinerary problem.

Then again, an extra day on Santorini isn't exactly a punishment.

A Greek island-hopping honeymoon can be a wonderful way to make the trip more varied. Just give each island enough time. The next stop should add something to your honeymoon, not turn it into a race between checkout, the port and the next ferry.

Exhaustion isn't a particularly good companion for either a wedding or a honeymoon.