Isle be back - guide to the Greek islands

EasyJet’s decision to retain four routes to the Greek islands following its purchase of GB Airways has come as a relief to specialist operators and dynamic packaging companies. Dave Richardson looks at what five of the top islands have to offer:

Skiathos Where: It’s one of the Sporades islands in the northern Aegean, in eastern Greece.

Flights: Charters only, from main UK airports between May and October.

Accommodation: Mainly three-star, with a choice of hotels, apartments and a few villas. A few boutique hotels have opened recently.

Typical visitors: Skiathos is almost exclusively for couples and families, attracted by the many sandy beaches.

Time travel in Greece

The Tholos area shows a virtual journey to Athens from archaic times to the Roman era, getting a close up view of the city’s temples and beautiful buildings. With the goddess Athena as guide in the Agora visitors watch the destruction of Athens by the Persians, participate in building the Poikile Stoa, follow the Panathenaic Procession and can even vote in a process known as ‘ostrakismos’ which allowed citizens to vote out men who where believed to be a threat for the good of the city; visitors take part in this process by pressing a button next to their seats and expressing their opinion of who they want to depart. Finally, the newest virtual reality tour takes visitors on a walk through Ancient Olympia, the cradle of the Olympic Games.

‘The target was to create a user-friendly GUI to enable the FHW staff to run the show by pressing just a single button,’ says Dimitris Mexis, responsible engineer for control systems at Telmaco. ‘Two different timelines were created, one for the pre-show area and one for the main show in the Tholos area. In addition, some more pages were created in the GUI, in order to control each device separately.’

Yoga for beginners in Greece

Travel à la carte have been running yoga holidays in Corfu and Paxos for 15 years. Often the students on the yoga holiday are the same students that the teachers see in weekly classes back home, so integrating beginners can cause problems – especially for the new student, who is asked to play catch up both on the social front and on the mat!

As a solution, TALC asked Zoë Reason, who has been coming to Paxos with them for over ten years, first as a student and more recently as a teacher, to devote a whole week to complete beginners.

Across the Aegean Sea

Not that the announcements varied wildly. "Welcome to the beautiful island of...." and "gather in the main lounge at 9am for tour one" became familiar phrases throughout the two-week cruise in these sun-soaked waters.

With a total of 6,000 Greek islands to choose from, a smallish cruise ship like the Spirit lets you experience as many in a fortnight as you might see in a decade of `normal' holidays.