Island

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit Greece, in One Sentence We had the August ferries to Santorini and Naxos half-booked when a friend who’d done the same trip the year before sent a blunt message: “It was 38 degrees, the caldera path was a wall of people, and our room cost a fortune.” We almost ignored her, because August is when the office empties out. Then I priced the identical island-hop in late September and watched it come back a third cheaper, with the sea supposedly at its warmest all year. We moved the trip, swam off a near-empty Naxos beach in bathwater-warm water, and lower down I’ll admit the one ferry date we still got wrong. ...

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you make a booking through these links, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The Best Time to Visit the Philippines, in One Sentence The ferry captain just shrugged. We’d shown up in El Nido in late August expecting island-hopping paradise and instead got a sky the colour of wet concrete, a typhoon warning two islands over, and boat trips cancelled for the third day running. We’d booked on price alone, and the price had a reason. I sat on the hostel porch watching the rain and made a promise to come back in the right season — which, six months later, I did, and the difference was night and day. ...