Cost of Greece Vacation: Here are ALL our numbers!

In this post I discuss how we spend our money abroad and then break down the cost of our Greece vacation. From a cost perspective, I’ll dive into how we got around, what type of restaurant we dined at and which hotels we chose.

Overview of how we spend money and our style

When discussing money and travel abroad, it always seems like such a mystery as to how much things cost. I’m not sure if this is a result of the travel agent industry, or because culturally we don’t like to talk about money…but it’s an issue. (It also could simply be because it’s difficult to budget a trip until you plan it and the average person isn’t going to spend time on the entire planning process).

The truth of the matter is that we all travel differently depending on our style, financial situation, families etc.. For example, the person who has no kids and wants to travel frugally, can grab a backpack full of clothes, get the cheapest plane ticket they can find to Portugal and stay in hostels. On the other hand, a full family of four, who wants to be comfortable visiting Iceland, has a larger budget and wants to travel comfortably, might spend a LOT more money. Those two trips are dramatically different in cost.

Watching the sunset in Imerovigli (Santorini) with a bottle of local white wine!

For Kailah and I, we approach our time abroad “somewhere in the middle” when it comes to money. Below are the factors we consider relevant to a traveling budget and the route we took for our Greece trip:

1. Location: We targeted the “hot” locations (like Athens, Mykonos and Santorini), which obvious came with a larger price tag than others.

2. Duration: We limited our trip to 7 nights - flying out on Friday night and back home on the following Saturday. We have kids, so we didn’t want to leave them for much longer than that.

3. Family travel: This was a couples trip, so we were much more flexible this time around and could book smaller accommodations.

4. Accommodations: Lets just say…our appetite for international travel was “high” when we planned this trip. While we didn’t spend for luxury (as we rarely do), we definitely didn’t look to save money on accommodations.

5. Restaurants: We went “all-in” on food and drinks (that’s our style). Again, we didn’t look for luxury, but easily spent $150-$200 a night on some dinners.

6. Logistics: We moved around a lot during this trip, driving up cost a bit (4 different locations in the first 4 days). Planes are generally the largest cost in this category, but ferries and car transfers definitely crept up on us.

Mid-ferry beers on our way from Mykonos to Paros (yes, things like this wound up in our “food and drink” cost)

Summary of expenses

The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Drum roll please…the Greece cost for our 7 nights was…

$5,863.92 (all in, including flights)

The official break down by category is as follows:

• Accommodations: $1,293.85

• Food and drink: 2,255.91

• Parking: $323.00

• Transportation: 1,991.17

I’ll break down each category a little…

Our Santorini balcony and hot tub at Zenith Blue Villas (respect the “farmers tan” ;) )

Accommodations: Since we stayed 7 nights, our average cost ran at a rate of $185 a night. Which is extremely reasonable in my mind. Especially including that we stayed ON the caldera in Santorini for three nights. That was our most expensive rate at ~$230 a night. Our most inexpensive was $105 for our VERY well located boutique hotel room in Mykonos (Hotel Carbonaki).

Food and drink: Yea…we know. This sounds like A LOT to spend in a week. And it probably is. But if you read our restaurant travel style above, you can easily see how we spent that much (and it was worth it!). A few examples of where we ate…

Our Mykonos dinner at Karavaki overlooking the beautiful town and harbor at sunset summed $185

Dinner at Karavaki overlooking Mykonos

Our first dinner overlooking the caldera in Santorini at the Aegeon Restaurant summed $159

Our final dinner in Santorini cost us $194 at Oia Gefsis in Oia (Santorini)

Parking: $323 is unnecessary here. The economy garage was closed during covid, so we chose to park in central parking at Boston Logan. We easily could have parked at a “park-and-fly” for a much better rate.

Transportation: We saved on flights by using points and only spent $681 to get to Greece. We tacked on another $302 for our flight getting us from Santorini back to Athens. The remaining dollars spent went to ferries and car transport, with the majority being allocated to Ubers and hotel transfers.

To sum it all up…

Exploring Mykonos and found this spot in front of the windmills!

Before I let you go, I want to make sure to drive one point home. I’m sure I sound like a broken record by now, but…cost is relative. This trip fit our style for THIS adventure (styles can change, even between trips!). We could have done it cheaper and we could have done it MUCH more expensive. And with that being said, if we had more flexibility with our time, we probably would have looked to save cash by eating in more and finding longer term accommodations.

If you are interested in all of the details of our Greece 2021 trip, check out our itinerary located here. (you can also see our 2017 Greece details here!).

I hope this helps with future planning and gives transparency into the cost of travel to Greece!

Kyle

Want alerts for when new blogs are posted? Scroll down and subscribe to our email list!

***If you haven’t seen our YouTube videos on our October 2021 trip, check them out below!

Travel with Credit Card Points: The Cards We Use

In this post, I discuss our current travel credit card strategy, including which cards we use, why we use them and how we use them to travel cheaper. Find out which card we used to get $8,000 worth of flights for free! I’ll also touch on the most important part of travel credit cards…how you use them to maximize your personal spend at NO additional risk!

Our strategy:

THE $8k business class tickets to Madrid from Boston

When it comes to travel credit cards, our main goal is to earn points to exchange them for flights. Since our most expensive flights are international, we usually build up points via our cards and use them in bulk. Generally speaking, we use cards with a large partnership network, so that we can easily transfer points directly to the partner airline and use them to book direct.

Our cards:

We’ve held onto our current two cards for almost three years now (which seems like a record for us). We generally switch them every couple of years to take advantage of the hefty sign-up bonuses. Due to finding a couple of cards with large partner networks and decent point bonuses, we’ve stayed put and racked up some serious “mileage” (You’ll notice that I use mileage and points interchangeably sometimes).

So which ones are they?

Earning those points back in NH!

• American Express Gold/Rose Gold Card ($250 annual fee)

  • This is hands-down our favorite card.

    • It gives you 4x points on both restaurants and supermarkets AND 3X points on airlines (1X points for everything else). We do this stuff A LOT, so our points build quickly.

    • Another huge benefit of the Amex Gold is that it currently has 17 global partner airlines . So that gives us huge flexibility in how we use our points, especially when traveling abroad (but for our American friends, Delta and Jet Blue are on that list!).

  • Currently, the card comes with a 60,000 point bump for signing up and putting $4k through it in the first 6 months.

  • It’s worth noting the $250 annual fee. While this seems like a lot on the surface, with our spending and our credit card process outlined below, we pay for this many times over. Our Spain flights alone were round trip, in business class, and would have cost us over $8,000! This is because points don’t necessarily have a dollar-per-point value. In some cases they do, but in others, airlines may give your points a much higher value.

Cathay Pacific first class upgrade!

• Alaska Airlines Visa ($75 annual fee)

  • We’ve hung on to this one as our “domestic card” for a few reasons.

    • First off, they give an annual companion fare for ~$125 instantly giving you your return on the $75 annual fee (and pre-pandemic we shot for at least one Alaska airlines trip per year).

    • Secondly, Alaska Airlines has 24 worldwide partner airlines where you can transfer your points. So this makes international flight exchanges available

    • Lastly, we live close to Boston Logan airport and Alaska offers several convenient, direct flights to most west coast cities, earning 3 points per dollar spent

  • The current sign-up bonus is 60,000 points, with $3k spend in the first 3 months

  • As a bonus for us: Pre-pandemic, we flew Cathay Pacific to Vietnam and back, leveraging our Alaska Airlines membership account and racked up serious mileage (20,000 points!) to combine with our already growing account

How we use our cards to maximize our personal spend:

One of our points flights to San Diego

I’m sure it goes without saying, but did you notice that I didn’t mention the APR %, or interest % in my benefits above? That’s simply because we NEVER let a balance roll over a given billing period. It would completely defeat the purpose of leveraging these cards for travel, since our interest payments would cancel out the value gained. So what do we do?

Our process:

1. Identify applicable charges: Anytime we spend money, we funnel it through our cards. The only exceptions to this rule is where you can’t use a card (ie mortgage) and recurring expenses where a fee is charged for using a credit card. When the latter is the case, we generally stay away from charging the card because the earned points are potentially worth less than the fee costs.

2. Setup autopay: We immediately connect our checking account to our credit card bill pay and setup auto pay. This will automatically pay off the statement balance whenever it is due. By automating this process, we don’t have to worry about timely payments, or even our own discipline to pay on time.

3. Earn: By automating the process, we’ve set ourselves up to start stashing away points for redemption. Then when we start planning a trip, we can research all of the partner airlines (directly on their site) to see how many points we need to pay for the flights. Note: in many cases, if you are short on points, you can either book points with dollars, OR purchase a few extra points to top off your account.

Get your “Travel Like it’s 2019” tees!

Support us in style in 2022!

Click here

Well there ya have it. I hope this helps provide a high level lens into the value of travel credit cards. While many blogs and websites out there will make it more complicated than it needs to be (you can go crazy with this stuff!), it really is as simple as 1. Choose a card 2. Setup autopay and 3. Earn/redeem

Keep living presently and traveling often,

Kyle

Greece by Ferry: How do we book?

One of the Blue Star “Slow Ferries” in port

Traveling by ferry seems like a right of passage for visiting the Greek islands. Who hasn’t seen those beautiful landscapes dotted with white washed buildings and blue capped churches? Well, that view can only be seen from one vantage point…the water!

Similar to our 2017 trip, we chose ferries as our primary form of transportation from Athens to the Greek isles and then inter-island during our recent adventure. We slept on a different island three nights in a row and used ferries the entire time. As I was sitting on the boat from Mykonos to Paros, I couldn’t help but think “man, this process is really stress free”. Maybe it was my third Mythos (Greek lager) of the day talking, but I’m pretty sure it was the process I followed to plan and book our ferry logistics.

So what worked for us?

Stop along the way through the Greek Islands

1. Leverage third party sites: I start with a third party ferry search flight like “Lets Ferry”. It allows you to search dates for the timeframe you are traveling and then gives the travel times across multiple ferry companies (Yes, like air travel, there are multiple companies that compete in the Aegean Sea!). Once you find the date and time that works best, take note of the company and move to step two.

2. Navigate directly to ferry company site: This one is self explanatory, but once you find your ferry in step one, you want to go directly to the website of that company. This saves you the admin fee of the third party site (and who doesn’t like savings?!).

3. Select your seat: This one can be a bit situational.

   1. Fast Ferries: On the “fast ferries” (generally any boat except Blue Star), there are two classes; economy and business. Honestly, business class isn’t all that special, but it generally comes with smaller crowds and a dedicated bar. If the extra cost is worth it to you, then by all means, splurge (we did during COVID and loved having almost NOBODY in our compartment and enjoyed a few Mythos).

   2. Slow Ferries: The “slow ferries” are a different animal. In my mind, there are really four options; private room/compartment, business class, airline seats and economy class. Let me break them down in order of general cost (most expensive to least):

      1. Private room/compartment: We actually did this on our first trip to the Greek islands because Kailah was pregnant. It allowed her a traditional private “cruise room” with beds to lie down in throughout the duration of our journey (Athens to Santorini is 7 hours on the slow ferry!). Since we had so many travelers, it wasn’t that expensive and we still had access to the business class restaurant/bar service.

      2. Business class: We went this route on our recent trip as it cut down on the crowds (for COVID) and it gave a relaxing full service restaurant/bar for the duration of the journey. The seating isn’t as comfortable however, as it is mostly chairs around a table. However, if the cost is worth it to you, we recommend this option.

      3. Airline seats: These seats are better than airplane seats as they provide a more reclined seating option for the longer duration ferries. If you are going to sleep on the trip and don’t want a compartment, this probably your best bet. They share the restaurants and bar with the economy seats.

      4. Economy: These are the “plain jane” table seats with a shared restaurant and bar. Cheapest, but the ship is so large you’ll have plenty of space to get up and walk around.

4. Buy through the ferry company site: Once you choose your seat, continue and purchase your tickets directly through the ferry company site. One important note that we found useful was that most ferry companies have a pretty flexible cancellation policy, in case something happens (or you need to cancel due to a global pandemic).

Our business class seats aboard superjets

That’s it! I hope this simplifies the Greek ferry process and inspires you to book with confidence. Oh, and in case you are struggling to find out the name of the Athens port, its called “Piraeus”. Yep, this one took me forever to find too!

Keep maximizing those experiences!

Kyle