Cheap Flights to Greece: The Islands Are the Two Worst Fares in Europe

Mykonos and Santorini are the 40th and 39th cheapest cities of the 40 we price in Europe. There is no worse fare in our grid than a flight to a Greek island.

Athens is $201 and $181 below them on median. That gap is the entire story of booking Greece.

Three cities, and two of them are the bottom of Europe

City	Median	Cheapest fare	From	Rank in Europe
Athens	$764	$571	Chicago	27th of 40
Santorini	$945	$818	Los Angeles	39th of 40
Mykonos	$965	$826	Los Angeles	40th of 40

Athens at 27th is not cheap in absolute terms — it sits $147 above Stockholm, the cheapest city in our grid. But against its own islands it is the obvious move.

The premium for flying directly to an island is $181 to $201 per person. A Greek domestic flight from Athens to either island, or a ferry from Piraeus, costs a fraction of that. On two travelers the direct routing is a $400 decision.

For the comparison most people are actually making, Greece or Italy prices both from every US gateway; Italy wins all of them.

Why the islands price this badly

Santorini and Mykonos have no US service. Every fare into them is a connection assembled by a European carrier, usually routed through its own hub, and priced as a seasonal leisure itinerary rather than as a transatlantic route.

Two consequences show up in our data. The medians are the worst in Europe, and the spreads are wide — $360 on Santorini and $287 on Mykonos — because a connection through an expensive hub and a connection through a cheap one are very different products sold under the same city name.

Athens, by contrast, is a real transatlantic market with nonstop service and carriers competing for it. That is the whole difference.

The Los Angeles result is real but strange

Los Angeles is the cheapest US gateway for both islands — $818 to Santorini and $826 to Mykonos — and it is not the cheapest for Athens, where Chicago leads at $571.

We publish that because it is what we observed, and we flag it because it is the kind of result that should not be trusted as a pattern. An island fare is a connecting itinerary, and connecting itineraries move more between collection days than nonstop routes do. A West Coast airport leading on two Aegean islands while trailing on the Greek capital is more likely an artifact of which connections were available on our collection day than a durable feature of the market.

Treat it as a prompt to check rather than as advice. If you are flying from Los Angeles, the island fares are worth pricing directly. If you are not, the Athens routing is the reliable play.

Athens by gateway

Gateway	Fare into Athens
Chicago	$571
New York	$600
Boston	$655
Atlanta	$674
Los Angeles	$674
Miami	$674
San Francisco	$674

Chicago at $571 is $29 clear of New York, which is unusual — New York leads on most Mediterranean cities in our grid, including Rome and Milan.

The four-way tie at $674 is worth noticing too. Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco all landing on the same number suggests a single connecting itinerary being sold from multiple origins at a common price, which is exactly how a hub carrier fills a secondary market.

It is not because they are islands

The intuitive explanation for the island premium is remoteness, and our grid says that is wrong.

City	Median	Cheapest fare	From	Rank in Europe
Reykjavik	$632	$422	New York	2nd of 40
Malta	$748	$507	Boston	25th of 40
Athens	$764	$571	Chicago	27th of 40
Santorini	$945	$818	Los Angeles	39th of 40
Mykonos	$965	$826	Los Angeles	40th of 40

Reykjavik is an island in the North Atlantic and the second-cheapest city in Europe. Malta is a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean and prices below Athens. Neither is closer to the United States than Santorini is, and both are considerably smaller.

What Reykjavik and Malta have that the Greek islands do not is direct transatlantic service and a carrier with a reason to fill it. Icelandair built an entire business model on routing Americans through Keflavik, which is why Reykjavik prices like a hub rather than like a rock in the ocean.

So the Greek island premium is not a geography tax. It is what happens when a destination is reachable only as somebody else's connection, sold in a season, with nobody competing to carry you there. That is a fixable problem in principle and not one you can fix from the booking screen — which is precisely why the Athens routing is the answer rather than a better search.

How to book Greece

• Fly to Athens. The $181 to $201 island premium is larger than any domestic connection you will buy to replace it.
• Check Chicago. It leads New York by $29 on Athens, which is rare.
• If you are in Los Angeles, price the islands directly — it is the one gateway where our data says that might work.
• Book the domestic leg separately and allow a real connection buffer, because a missed island hop on a separate ticket is your problem rather than the airline's.
• Treat $571 as the floor and $764 as normal for Athens. Under $700 into Athens is a good fare.

When to go

Greece is the one country on this site where the cheapest months and the sensible months diverge sharply, because the islands substantially shut outside the season.

• Late April to May — the strongest window. Fares are in the shoulder, the islands are open, and the crowds have not arrived.
• Late September into October — the same trade with warmer water and a harder end date as services wind down.
• June to August — roughly double, and the islands at their most crowded. The worst value in our data.
• November to March — the cheapest fares of the year into Athens, and a genuinely good time to visit the city, the Peloponnese and the mainland. Most island infrastructure is closed.
• The fortnight around Christmas and New Year — a sharp spike, and Athens is the only part of Greece worth it then.

The seasonal multiples above are my rule of thumb from nine years of flying to Europe, not a measurement. The grid prices the six months after each collection and stores the fare, not the week; the September 2026 snapshot records both, and this section will be rewritten from what it shows.

Method, and its limits

Every fare was collected on August 30, 2026 from Google Flights, priced as a one-week round trip in economy for one adult, taking the cheapest available week in the following six months, from each of 26 US gateway metros. Rankings use the median across all 26 gateways, never the minimum.

What this does not measure. Baggage is excluded, and most headline fares are the cheapest bucket. Greek domestic flights and ferry fares are not in our dataset — the comparison above is between our transatlantic observations and the well-established fact that a domestic hop costs far less than $181, not between two things we priced.

This grid is refreshed monthly, in one sitting, and stamped with its date.

Where to go from here

• Athens, Santorini and Mykonos each have a page with all 26 US gateways priced against them.
• Cheap flights from Chicago — the gateway that leads on Athens.
• Cheap flights to Italy — the same fly-to-the-hub argument, with better trains.
• The cheapest places to fly in Europe ranks all 40 destinations, with the Greek islands at the bottom.
• Which European airport should you fly into? — the same question across the continent.