About The Skiathos Guide

Skiathos is small enough to finish. It is one island with one town, one airport and three ferry routes to the mainland. The subject is countable, so this guide tries to be complete rather than selective. That is the only real advantage a site like this has over a general Greece site, and it is the whole plan.

It holds 130 places to eat, 27 beaches, 14 sights, 26 planning pages, 13 comparison guides and a page for every one of the 27 bus stops. Every restaurant has its own page with five category scores, the published ratings from Google, Tripadvisor and Restaurant Guru, and a write-up. Every beach page records how you reach it, what is on it and which wind ruins it. Twelve month pages give the air temperature, the sea temperature, the rain days and what is actually open in that month. The bus pages number every stop, because on this island your address is a stop number rather than a street name.

There is also a trip dates tool. You give it two dates and it works out what the guide can honestly say about those exact days, then refuses the rest. It will not give you a forecast, because a forecast for a fortnight away does not exist.

None of this is a live feed. It is a fixed set of pages, researched on named dates, and every page tells you how old its numbers are.

Tripadvisor lists up to 299 establishments on Skiathos. This guide covers 130. The other 169 are mostly seasonal cafés, kiosks and snack bars with no published dining record to read, and writing about them would mean inventing an opinion. The line is drawn at places with enough review history to see a pattern.

There are no hotel reviews. The guide takes no bookings, sells no tours, transfers, car hire or tickets, and has no basket. It carries no user reviews, so there is nothing to moderate and no score anyone can game by asking their customers to post.

Three specific facts are missing on purpose, and the guide says so out loud rather than filling the gap: the Skiathos to Skopelos ferry crossing time, whether Agios Konstantinos is currently served, and whether any Skiathos bus has a wheelchair ramp. In each case the sources conflicted and a confident single number would have been worse than silence.

There is no winter timetable for the boats either. Ferries run to Skiathos all year. The research only holds the summer tables, so outside those dates the tools say they do not know, rather than saying nothing runs.

The test to apply. A guide that never says "we do not know" is either much better researched than this one or it is guessing. Where a fact is absent here, you should be able to see that it is absent.

Mostly for people who have already booked. Once the flights are paid for, the questions change. They stop being "is Skiathos nice" and become "which bus stop is my hotel", "can I get to that beach without a car", "is the taverna in the photo open in early May" and "will the wind ruin Wednesday". Those are the questions this guide is built around, because they are the ones a general Greece site cannot afford to answer for sixty separate beaches.

Second, for people choosing a month. The twelve month pages exist because the honest answer to "when should I go" is not July. It is June or September for most people, and the pages give the numbers rather than the adjectives so you can disagree with the conclusion.

Third, for people who live and work on the island. The For businesses section is written for them, and it is a different job from the visitor pages: what visitors search for, how the season actually shapes a week, and how the island looks to a machine that is answering a traveller's question.

It is not written for someone deciding between Greece and Spain. There are better sites for that, and they are easy to find.

The visitor half of this guide earns nothing. There is no advertising on it. No banner ads, no display network, no sponsored posts, no paid placements and no affiliate links. Nothing here pays a commission when you book a hotel, a flight, a ferry or a tour, because there is nothing on the site that can.

There are 867 outbound links on the site and they fall into four groups. 711 of them credit a photograph: its page on Wikimedia Commons or Flickr, or the Creative Commons licence it was released under. 87 go to a business's own website. 60 sit in the For businesses section and point at the thing being discussed, such as an EU regulation, a data protection regulator or a platform's own documentation. 9 are this guide's own WhatsApp. Not one of them carries a tracking code or a partner tag. You can check that yourself by hovering over any link on any page.

The one commercial thing here is the For businesses section. It is written for people who run a business on Skiathos, and it ends with an invitation to message a person called Ben on WhatsApp for a free consultation about getting found online. That is a route to paid work and you should know it exists before you weigh anything else on the site.

What that must never do. It does not reach the visitor pages. Being listed in the guide is free, no business has paid for or influenced its placement, its score or its write-up, and a better position is not for sale. If any of that ever changes, this page changes on the same day.

There are no third-party scripts. Not one script on this site is loaded from another company's server. No analytics, no tag manager, no pixel. There is no cookie banner because the site sets no cookies at all. Open it, look at your browser's cookie list for this domain, and it is empty.

It does store two things in your own browser, and only if you ask it to. Saving a place to My trip, and choosing dark mode, are both kept in your browser's local storage. That never leaves your machine and nothing here reads it back to us. Clear your browser data and both are gone.

Two things do still reach Google, and you should know about both. Maps load only if you click a map yourself. Until you click, a map here is inert HTML with a plain link in it. Fonts are the one we are less happy about. The page styling pulls its typefaces from Google Fonts, so your browser asks Google for them on every page, without being asked first. It sets no cookie, but it does tell Google your IP address. Hosting those font files on this domain would end that, and it has not been done yet.

No page on this site carries an author's name, and this page is not going to invent one. The structured data credits The Skiathos Guide as an organisation, which is accurate and thin. Only one living person is named as a contact: Ben, in the For businesses section, for a consultation. He is not credited as the writer of any page, so this page will not credit him as one either. The other people named on the site are the 18 photographers whose pictures it uses, credited on the photo credits page and in the markup of every page their work appears on. None of them wrote anything here.

That is a real weakness and it is worth saying why it matters. A guide asking you to trust its restaurant scores should tell you whose judgement those scores are, what that person has stood on themselves and what they have only read about. An author page is the next thing this site owes you and it is not written yet.

Until it exists, judge the guide the harder way. Does it name its sources? Does it state how confident it is? Does it mark its estimates as estimates instead of dressing them as measurements? Does it log its mistakes with dates? Those four things are on the site now and you can check every one of them on the how we research page and the corrections page.

Four things are worth knowing before you rely on anything here.

The category scores are opinions. The five scores on every restaurant page for food, setting, service, value and atmosphere are editorial judgements drawn from the published review record. They are not platform data and Google does not publish a category breakdown at all. Anyone showing you a "Google food score" made it up.

The published ratings are a dated snapshot. They were gathered on 16 August 2026 and aggregate scores drift every day. Treat them as of that date, not as live.

The website audit is inferred. Of 130 restaurant website records, 35 carry low confidence, and none of the sites were loaded and looked at, because the network the research ran on blocked them. The reasoning is set out in full on the research page.

The demand model is a structural estimate. It has no footfall, till or booking data behind it, because none exists for businesses this size. It is arithmetic over things about the island that are published, and it is labelled as an estimate wherever it appears.

When the guide is wrong about a fact, the fix and the date go in the correction log rather than being edited in quietly.