10 Reasons to Avoid a Santorini Cruise

Greece › Why Cruises Suck
Updated: September 29, 2026 • By Santorini Dave

See Also

• Where to Stay in Santorini
• Where to Stay in Mykonos
• Where to Stay in Crete
• Where to Stay in Rhodes
• Where to Stay in Athens

Cruises to Greece in 2027

If your idea of a dream vacation involves being herded like cattle onto a floating shopping mall or trapped in a slow-moving retirement home with buffet pizza and 3,000 strangers, then by all means, book a cruise to Santorini.

It’s a sterile, cookie-cutter way to “see” Santorini while missing much of what makes the island special. I wrote this guide to convince you to cancel that cabin and stay on the island like a guest rather than a cargo shipment.

Wall Street Journal Article

Greek Cruises – My Advice

• Are Greek island cruises worth it? They can be convenient, but they’re a lousy way to experience the Greek islands. You get a few rushed hours in each place, usually at exactly the same time as thousands of other cruise passengers. Take the ferries and stay on the islands instead.
• Santorini Cruise Ship Schedule for 2027: Cruise ships don’t dock at the Santorini ferry port. They anchor in the caldera and most passengers are tendered to the Old Port (Skala) below Fira. From there it’s a steep walk or cable car ride up to town. Check the cruise arrival schedule before planning a day in Oia or Fira. If you’re staying on Santorini, the difference between a light cruise day and a heavy one can be dramatic.

Santorini and Mykonos Cruises: These are two of the worst Greek islands to visit by large cruise ship. Both are far better early in the morning, in the evening, and when you have enough time to wander, eat, swim, and change your plans. A six or eight-hour port call gives you exactly the opposite experience.

NY Times Article

• The Santorini Cruise Limit: Santorini introduced an 8,000-passenger daily ceiling for 2025 and 2026 after some previous peak days brought far more people to the island. That’s an improvement, but 8,000 cruise visitors arriving on a small island in a few hours is still a lot. And it’s a passenger limit, not a one-ship-at-a-time rule. Several ships can be in the caldera on the same day.
• The 2027 Schedule: Cruise traffic is not going away. The official 2027 schedule runs almost year-round, including January, and on busy days several ships are scheduled together. Some large ships stay well into the evening, so the old advice that cruise ships are always gone before sunset is no longer true.
• 2028 and Beyond: There is plenty of talk about controlling overtourism, but there is no plan to phase out cruising. Santorini’s port authority has already established the booking timetable for 2028 and says the same system will continue for future seasons. The policy is clearly to manage cruise traffic, not eliminate it.
• NY Times article on Amsterdam & Barcelona banning cruise ships.
• Cruises not welcome here: Inside the European cities banning giant ships

Santorini Cruises

Please don’t take a cruise to Santorini. Large cruise ships add thousands of people to Fira, Oia, the roads, and the Old Port in the middle of the day. Greece now charges cruise passengers arriving in Santorini a €20 fee from June through September. That might raise some useful money, but €20 is not enough to persuade someone who has already paid thousands for a cruise to skip Santorini.

The bigger problem is economic. Santorini has limited roads, limited space in Oia and Fira, limited capacity at the Old Port, and only so many hours in the day when visitors want to use them. A cruise passenger might spend money on a bus tour, cable car, lunch, or souvenir. But an overnight visitor pays for a hotel, restaurants, drinks, taxis, tours, and often several days of spending. Worse, the costs of cruise congestion fall heavily on people who don’t benefit from it.

The current system is better than allowing 15,000 or more cruise passengers to descend on the island on the same day. But an 8,000-passenger ceiling should not be confused with solving the problem.

If you really want to see what makes Santorini special, stay overnight. Sleeping in a cave hotel and waking up to the caldera outside your window is something a cruise passenger simply doesn’t get. I recommend five to seven days for most first-time visitors, but even one night is better than a rushed cruise stop.

For sightseeing, wineries, hiking, and good weather without the worst summer crowds, I especially like April to early June and late September to early November. See my guide to the best time to visit Santorini.

Oia is one of the most popular destinations for cruise passengers. Go early or late if you’re staying on Santorini and want to avoid the biggest crowds.

What cruises are going to Santorini in 2027? Dozens of ships are scheduled to visit Santorini. The schedule changes too often to make a giant list useful. Check the current arrival schedule before your trip. More important than the ship’s name is how many cruise passengers are scheduled to be on the island that day and when the largest ships arrive and depart.

What are the worst cruises for visiting Santorini? The biggest ships. A ship carrying 4,000-plus passengers can transform Fira, Oia, and the Old Port within a couple of hours. Odyssey of the Seas, for example, appears on the 2027 schedule with an estimated 4,497 passengers on some calls. That’s more than half the old 8,000-person daily ceiling from one ship. Truly awful.

What are the best cruises for visiting Santorini? If you’re determined to cruise, smaller is better. SeaDream, Windstar, Star Clippers, and other small-ship lines bring a fraction of the passengers and are much less destructive to the experience onshore.

When do cruises visit Santorini? Almost all year. The official 2027 schedule includes ships even in January. Cruise traffic is heaviest from spring through fall.

Recommended travel agents for Greece: Fantasy Travel is good for planning trips to Greece and the Greek islands.

But you don’t need a cruise or organized tour to visit Santorini. Use my Santorini Travel Guide, take the ferry, and stay on the island.

Cruises to Santorini and the Greek Islands

10 reasons not to do a Santorini cruise:

1. You don’t have enough time. A port call might look generous on the itinerary, but tendering ashore, getting from the Old Port up to Fira, traveling around the island, and getting back to the ship eats into it quickly. Santorini is not a good place to rush.

2. You see Santorini when it’s most crowded. Cruise passengers arrive in large waves and concentrate in the same places, especially Fira and Oia. If you’re staying on the island, early morning and evening are much better.

3. You miss the best part of staying here. Cave hotels, long dinners, breakfast overlooking the caldera, drinks after sunset, and waking up before the crowds arrive are a huge part of the Santorini experience.

4. You miss the quiet hours. Some ships now stay until late evening, so it’s no longer true that Santorini empties completely before sunset. But mornings are still wonderfully quiet, and evenings generally improve as day visitors return to their ships.

Breakfast at a Santorini hotel with a caldera view.

5. Your schedule is not your own. Want another hour at lunch? Want to stay in Oia for sunset? Want to skip sightseeing and spend the afternoon at a winery? Too bad. The ship leaves when the ship leaves.

6. Most of my favorite Santorini tours take too long. A proper catamaran cruise, volcano boat tour, winery tour, fishing trip, or photography tour is much easier when you’re sleeping on the island and don’t have a departure deadline hanging over you.

7. You tend to see the same places as everyone else. Fira and Oia are wonderful, but so are Pyrgos, Emporio, and Megalochori. A cruise stop encourages exactly the sort of rushed sightseeing Santorini handles worst.

8. The Old Port is a terrible bottleneck. Most independent cruise passengers arrive at the tiny Old Port below Fira. From there, the cable car and walking path are the main ways up the cliff. When several large ships overlap, the queues can be miserable. Some organized excursions use Athinios instead, but that simply puts passengers onto buses and into Santorini’s already busy road system.

9. Large cruise ships put a lot of people and pollution into a very small place. Whatever you think of cruising generally, concentrating thousands of additional day visitors in Fira and Oia is a poor fit for Santorini’s geography.

10. Santorini is using scarce space for relatively short visits. This is the economic argument that rarely gets discussed. The island’s roads, villages, viewpoints, cable car, and Old Port have limited capacity. Overnight visitors use that same capacity but also pay for hotels and spend money over several days. If cruise congestion makes the island worse for the people staying longest and spending the most, allowing ever more cruise traffic can be a spectacularly shortsighted trade.

Summary: Santorini is better when you have time. Stay a few nights, get up early, linger over dinner, hike the caldera, visit a winery, and watch the island change after the daytime crowds thin out.

And if you arrived on this page after watching the absolutely awful Santorini show by Rick Steves, just ignore everything that guy recommends about seeing the Greek islands. I bet any local would tell you the same.

Greek Cruise vs Greek Ferries

For island hopping in Greece, I strongly prefer Greek ferries. A ferry gets you from one island to another. Then you get off, check into a hotel, and decide for yourself how long to stay.

A cruise is easier in one sense: your room follows you around and meals and entertainment are onboard. But that convenience is exactly the problem if your goal is to experience Greece. You’re sleeping, eating, and spending a large part of your vacation on the ship instead of on the islands.

With ferries, you can spend four nights on Santorini, three on Naxos, change your plans, eat wherever you want, stay out after sunset, and catch the next ferry when you’re ready. That’s how I would do it.

Small-Ship Cruises and Sailing Tours in Greece

I dislike big cruise ships, not boats. Sailing through the Greek islands can be fantastic. If you want to travel by sea, look at small yachts and ships carrying dozens or a few hundred passengers instead of several thousand.

• G Adventures: Small-group sailing trips on yachts. A good choice if the sailing itself is part of the appeal and you don’t need cruise-ship facilities.
• Variety Cruises: Small ships and motor sailers that can visit ports inaccessible or impractical for the giant cruise ships. More comfortable than a small charter yacht without becoming a floating shopping center.
• Running on Waves: A distinctive three-masted sailing ship carrying a tiny number of passengers compared with mainstream cruise ships.
• SeaDream Yacht Club: SeaDream I and II are small luxury yachts rather than conventional mega-ships. Expensive, but much closer to how I’d want to cruise the Greek islands.
• Windstar Cruises: Small ships, including the masted Wind Star and Wind Spirit. Still a cruise, but vastly preferable to arriving in Santorini with 4,000 shipmates.
• Intrepid Travel: Small-group yacht trips with more time in smaller islands and harbors. Better suited to travelers who want sailing and island hopping rather than a conventional cruise.

My Advice: If you want to see Greece from the water, go small. Fifty passengers arriving at an island is fundamentally different from 4,000 arriving at once.

Santorini Cruises – What to Know

Map of Santorini

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