Santorini for Cruise Ships: Avoid Cable Car Lines and Crowds!

Alex the tour guide was very good with explaining sights and I enjoyed the stops we made. The restaurant we stopped at had good views and food

The tour guide left me and my friend. When we got off the bus the group was gone. We could not find them. We had to call a friend to find out where they were. It was a scary ordeal.

Pick up on the pier easy and well organised. Tour good, our guide was engaging and knowledgeable. Visited good sites for scenic photo opportunities.

The tour was great. Our tour guide, Elam, did a great job. He was very knowledgeable in Biblical and archaeological information.

Alex was our tour guide, and he couldn’t have been more professional and personable. We enjoyed this tour so much. We are going to recommend it to our friends. He went above and beyond with all the information he passed on to us and we will always remember him when we think of Santorini.

A perfect tour - well organised, not rushed. Our guide Ioanna spoke easily understood English wand gave interesting information about the history, area and points of interest combined with her great sense of humour! We avoided the cable car queues as we were taken by a large boat to a nearby port. We then transferred to a luxury minibus carefully driven by Tasos with max 20 people. We travelled around the island stopping off for a while for photo opportunities, shopping and a beautiful lunch by the sea. Then back to the large boat back to port to get our tender to the ship. So glad we took this tour. Seriously well worth it and v stress free!

My husband and I traveled with neighbors on the Sun Princess. We wanted to avoid the cable car and chose this tour. The tricky part is getting your tender tickets early in the morning on the ship. We first made tour reservations for 9:00 am but moved it to 10:00 am because we worried about the tender lines. Things moved much faster than planned and we had plenty of time once we were on shore. We boarded the boat to take us to the next small port where our van was waiting. It was a very nice van with great air conditioning. Our guide, Yianni, was fantastic! I honestly cannot remember the order we visited everything, but it was amazing. Yianni knows all the best photo spots avoiding the long lines of all the people waiting to get a photo that everyone else posts on social media. He took some fantastic photos of each one in our group. It was an amazing day I will never forget. So glad we chose this tour. Do wear colors from the Santorini palette to make your photos pop.

Santorini is a beautiful city! Outside of Oia being extremely crowded (at no fault of the tour, there were 3 cruise ships docked this day), I loved this tour. It was nice to be able to skip the cable cars, however there were over 200 people that had to be transported via the boat, and that process was a little messy. But all in all, Perivolos Beach was beautiful, the quieter neighborhoods and village were very nice, and our tour guide was excellent!

Our tour guide was in the best term I can say - adorable- she has such love & admiration for her beautiful island -and was very appreciative that we’re visited and were interested in all she had to share - very best lunch spot also- she sets the bar for tour guides !

We went on the Santorini Skip, the cable line lines and at the time of our travel September 30. They were zero lines to go up the cable cars. Because of the rough weather, our trip was delayed almost 30 minutes. When we eventually got on our tender over to the buses we got there in about a 20 minute boat ride. It was very organized and we got on group 2 bus and our tour guide. George was very informative. We started the day by traveling over to OIA. When we got there, that is the place where the blue domes are. We waited a short line to take some pictures and only had enough time after that to do about 20 minutes of exploring. It definitely wasn’t enough from there. We went on a bus ride down to the other side of Santorini named Megalachori. This place was kind of known as the rich people where they live and where the vineyards are. Our tour guide George took us down this little road of maybe 15 minutes and explained a few things to us. It definitely took longer and then it should have. From there, we boarded our bus again and went down to the black beaches. Again because it was September 30 most of the places were shut down. We had enough time to have lunch at a Greek restaurant and get back onto the bus. The black beaches were kind of cool, but at that time of year it was cool and windy and really nobody wanted to go into the water. From there, we boarded the bus and went back to Port. From there, my wife and I took the cable car back up to Fira where there was no lines whatsoever. It was €10 each way each person to go up and down. We spent a good two hours in Fira exploring and having cocktails overlooking our cruise ship. Definitely recommend that. Overall, the trip was good however it seemed like we just got a taste of Santorini to wet our appetite and not got to explore Oia more. I would say on the six hour trip. We probably spent three hours on the bus traveling.