How we research this guide

Every restaurant carries five scores out of 10: food, setting, service, value and atmosphere. The overall figure is the straight mean of those five, nothing weighted and nothing clever.

They are editorial. They are a reading of the consistent themes in the published review record for each place: what reviewers praise repeatedly, what they complain about repeatedly, and whether those patterns hold across platforms and across time. A single furious review moves nothing. A complaint that appears on three platforms over two seasons moves the service score.

This matters because of what the platforms do not publish. Google gives a restaurant one star rating and no category breakdown at all. Tripadvisor publishes sub-ratings only sometimes and only for some venues. So any site showing you a "Google food score" for a Skiathos taverna has invented it. Ours are ours, and the site says so on every page that carries one.

Coverage is bounded on purpose. Tripadvisor lists up to 299 establishments on Skiathos. This guide scores 130: the ones with enough published review history to read a pattern from. The rest are seasonal kiosks and snack bars with no dining record, and scoring them would mean making the score up.

Use them as a steer, not a rule. These are opinions with a method behind them. They are not measurements, and they are not the platforms' numbers.

Alongside our scores, each restaurant page shows the aggregate ratings reported by Google, Tripadvisor and Restaurant Guru. Those belong to those platforms, not to this guide. They were gathered through desk research on 16 August 2026 and they are correct as of that date and no other.

Aggregate scores drift continuously. A restaurant with 1,900 reviews will not move much in a month. A restaurant with 40 reviews can move a whole tenth in a fortnight. Treat any rating on this site as a snapshot with a date on it, which is why the date is printed in the footer of every page rather than hidden on a policy page.

Where the platforms disagree sharply, the guide shows all of the figures and explains the disagreement in the write-up rather than quietly picking the flattering one. Sometimes the explanation is a merged or mismatched listing, sometimes a change of ownership that split the review history, sometimes a genuine collapse in standards that one platform has captured and another has not. Where we could not establish which from published sources, the write-up says we could not, and stops there.

There is no aggregate rating markup anywhere on this site, and there never will be. Publishing your own review scores as machine-readable star ratings on your own pages is self-serving markup, and it is not worth the risk or the dishonesty.

The twelve month pages carry six climate numbers each: daytime high, overnight low, sea temperature, rainfall in millimetres, rain days and sunshine hours. All of them come from one source, weather2travel.com, from its Skiathos Town climate pages.

One source was a choice, not laziness. The obvious alternative, weather-atlas.com, reports a day-to-night temperature range for this island of about 2.2 to 2.5°C. A land station on a Greek island does not behave that way. Those figures look like a marine grid point rather than a station on the ground, and using them would have told readers that January nights on Skiathos are 9°C. They are not.

The high and low here are the typical daytime peak and overnight minimum rather than strict climatological means. That makes the range slightly wider than a true monthly mean and closer to what a traveller actually wants to know before packing.

Every climate number on this site carries the label average. An average is true of a month and never true of a day. The August average high is 29°C and your Tuesday could be 34°C. The site refuses to print an average in the same typeface and with the same confidence as a computed value, because a reader who packs for 29°C on the strength of a bold figure is a reader we misled.

Three months carry lower confidence, and the pages say so. January's overnight low, sea temperature and rain days are all flagged low. July's sunshine hours are flagged medium. The August daytime high, the single most-quoted number on the island, is flagged low confidence too.

This is the weakest thing on the site and it needs saying first. The ferry, flight and cruise times on this site are not real. They are a made-up schedule. No sailing, flight or cruise call in the arrivals data was read from an operator, a timetable or a port authority.

The file is assets/arrivals-data.js?v=202608201508, built on 16 August 2026. It holds 146 records: 70 ferry, 72 flight and 4 cruise. Every single one of the 146 is marked source: "sample", and the file says so in its own opening lines. It calls itself sample data and it calls its records fictional.

What it is for is shape, not fact. The pattern is meant to look like a real August on Skiathos: boats through the morning and evening, flights bunched in the afternoon, the odd cruise call. A business looking at the dashboard can see how a week is shaped without the numbers being true of any actual Tuesday.

Where it appears, it is labelled. No visitor page loads this data at all. It is used only on the business dashboards, and each of those says on the page itself that the schedule is illustrative, a realistic sample and not a live feed. Nobody is being shown a fictional ferry time and told it is a real one.

This is the same mistake twice, and that is the point of putting it here. An earlier arrivals file on this site was invented, said so in its own header, and the site published figures from it as fact anyway. The header confessing is not the safeguard. This page is. Until a record in that file names an operator, a timetable or a port authority, no ferry or flight time on this site should be used to plan anything. Use the operator's own timetable.

Nobody publishes load factors for Skiathos. A 1,400 berth ferry in late October is not 1,400 people. So capacity carries its own basis on every record, and the four bases are kept apart on purpose: a published seat or berth count for that named vessel, a ship maximum, a worked-out estimate, or unknown with the field left null and the interface saying "not published".

The flight figures are the only estimates on the list. They are the Fraport July 2026 average of people per flight movement at Skiathos, 50.6 domestic and 147.0 international. That is a monthly average rather than a seat count, and the aircraft on your day may be bigger or smaller. The code refuses to add published numbers and estimated ones into one total without labelling both halves.

Read the section above before you read this one. The rules here are real and they are written into the code. The sailings they are applied to are not. A careful method running on a made-up schedule still gives you a made-up answer, and a page about method is the easiest place in the world to lose sight of that.

The business tools on this site show when trade arrives at a Skiathos venue across a day, a week and a season. That is a structural model, not a measurement. It observes no footfall, no card transactions and no bookings, because none of those exist for businesses at this scale. Nobody publishes them and no tool can know them.

What it does instead is combine things about the island that are published. The shape of the season, indexed so peak August is 100 and January is 4. The charter flight week, where Friday runs highest and Monday is the trough. The bus timetable and the 17:00 beach exodus, which moves a block of people off the south coast and into town in the same hour. Greek meal times, so a town taverna peaks at 21:00 and one that is empty at 19:30 is not failing. Ferry and cruise arrivals, which land people at the New Port in a block rather than a trickle. And the meltemi, which is northerly, so it pushes trade to the south coast.

Every coefficient is either drawn from that research or flagged in the file as an assumption. The first-night effect, where new arrivals eat out at a higher rate than people on day five of a self-catering week, is flagged as an assumption. It is widely observed in resort economies and it is not measured here.

Beach venues drop to zero from November to March rather than to a small number, because a beach bar in February is not quiet, it is shut.

What must never be done with it. Its output is not any venue's measured traffic. This is also why ferry capacity is deliberately kept out of the charts: turning 1,400 berths into 1,400 customers would invent thousands of visitors out of nothing. If a business gives us their own till or booking data, the model can be calibrated against it. Until then every figure it produces carries the estimate label.

There is one record per restaurant, 130 in all, saying whether the business has a website of its own and which social channels it runs. The picture it gives: 25 have both a site and social, 18 have a site only, 47 have social only, and 40 had nothing found at all. That was established through web research in August 2026.

The weakness is large and it comes first. The network policy of the environment this research ran in blocked outbound requests to restaurant domains, so not one of those sites was loaded and looked at. A record that a domain exists and is indexed is evidence the restaurant has a website. It is not a verdict on whether the website is any good.

Where a quality reading appears, it is inferred from indirect signals only: how many distinct pages are indexed, whether there is a booking flow, whether it serves over HTTPS, whether there are multilingual paths, and whether it sits on a free host or a builder subdomain. That is a hypothesis, and the site labels it as one.

Absence is weaker evidence than presence. "Nothing found" means nothing surfaced in search, which is not proof nothing exists. Small tavernas are routinely under-indexed. Confidence is recorded on every record for that reason: 43 are high, 52 medium and 35 low.

Auto-generated aggregator stubs are not counted as websites. They are scraped listing pages the restaurant did not make and usually does not control. Five restaurants have only those, and they are flagged, because it means their search results are owned by somebody else.

Every photograph on this site was taken by somebody else and shared under a licence that permits this use. There are 110 of them and all 110 are named on the photo credits page with the photographer and a link to the original: 45 under CC BY-SA 4.0, 37 under CC BY 2.0, 11 under CC BY-SA 3.0, 8 under CC BY 3.0, 6 under CC BY-SA 2.0, 2 public domain and 1 CC0.

Each one was opened and looked at. A photograph labelled "Skiathos beach" is very often a different beach and sometimes a different island, so every image was traced to its own source page, the photographer and exact licence were confirmed, and the picture on that page was compared with the one in use. 63 images were rejected because they showed something other than what they claimed. One set turned out to be the Mycenaean acropolis on Paros, which shares a name with the beach at Koukounaries.

No photograph here carries a non-commercial or no-derivatives licence, because both would make this use unlawful. Nothing was taken from Google, Tripadvisor, Booking, a hotel site or a restaurant's social page.

Photographs of named restaurants are not used at all. No freely licensed photograph of them exists, so a restaurant is illustrated by the view or the beach it is known for and the caption says which place that is, rather than implying it is a picture of the restaurant.

If you took one of these. If a credit is wrong, or you would rather the picture was not here, say so and it comes down. The route is on the corrections page.

Nothing on this site updates itself. There is no live feed anywhere on it, and everything is a dated snapshot. The restaurant data and the island data were researched on 16 August 2026. The website audit was August 2026. The arrivals timetables were gathered on 20 August 2026. Those dates are printed on the pages rather than kept here.

Different things rot at different speeds, and that is the useful thing to know. Aggregate review scores drift every day. Bus fares and timetables are re-set several times a year, and a lot of the figures circulating online for this island predate the 2022 rebuild of the bus network. Opening and closing dates for beach businesses are never published at all, by anybody, so the guide describes the season shape rather than pretending to a date.

Some things do not go stale. Sunrise, sunset and golden hour are computed astronomically rather than looked up, so they carry no uncertainty and will still be right in 2040. Orthodox Easter is computed the same way. Public holidays fixed in Greek law do not move. The site marks those as computed rather than measured precisely so you can tell them apart from the figures that will age.

The honest instruction. Treat every logistics figure on this site as a starting point and confirm it before you rely on it. The footer of every page says exactly that, and it is not a legal formula. It is the truth about island timetables.

Errors go in a dated log on the corrections page, with the old claim, the new one and the evidence for the change. The old claim stays visible. A correction log that deletes what it used to say is not a correction log.

Two corrections are on it so far. Both are dates in the island's festival calendar, both were found during research in August 2026, and in both cases the guide contradicted itself across pages for a while before the log caught up. That is written up in full rather than tidied away, because the interesting part of a correction is usually how the error survived, not the error.

There is one thing this guide will not do, and it is the thing most sites do. It will not edit a page quietly and say nothing. If a figure here changes, you should be able to find out that it changed, when, and on what evidence.

To report an error, message the guide on WhatsApp on 07308 669617. Point at the page and the claim. A correction that names a source gets fixed faster, but you do not need one to be worth reading.