Crete hotels: the part of the island matters more than the hotel

The only question worth answering first

Four towns hold the north coast, strung out in order from west to east: Chania, Rethymno, Heraklion, Agios Nikolaos, and each of them fronts a region with its own character. Chania to Agios Nikolaos is a little over three hours of driving, and the two airports that serve them are two hours and twenty minutes apart. Everything people regret about a Crete holiday traces back to underestimating that distance, usually at the moment they booked a cheap flight into Heraklion for a hotel near Kissamos.

What follows treats the island as four bases plus a south coast, because that is how it actually divides. Tick off what you want to see, and the shortlist writes itself.

The four bases, side by side

Prices here are relative to each other, not to a season or a star rating. The pattern holds year after year even as the numbers move: the east holds the expensive resorts, Heraklion is the cheap bed, and the two Venetian old towns charge a premium for their few dozen restored rooms.

Two columns in that table do most of the work. The airport column tells you what your transfer will cost in hours, and the car column tells you whether the hotel you are looking at is a base or a trap. A sea-view room 20 km from the nearest town is a very different holiday without a car than with one, and the photographs never say so.

Chania and the west: the one most people mean

If you have seen a photograph of Crete that made you want to come, there is a good chance it was taken within an hour of Chania. The Venetian harbour with the lighthouse at its mouth, the lanes of the old town behind it, Balos and its sandbar, the pink sand at Elafonissi, the Samaria gorge dropping sixteen kilometres to the Libyan Sea. The west has the scenery, and it has the town people are happiest walking around in the evening.

Staying inside the old town means a restored Venetian house with a courtyard, a handful of rooms, no pool and no parking. It is the most atmospheric bed on the island and it is priced accordingly. Move a ten minute walk east into the modern town and the same standard of room costs noticeably less, with the harbour still on your doorstep. West of Chania, along the strip towards Platanias and Kissamos, the big beach hotels take over and the calculation changes again: more pool, more space, and dinner wherever the hotel decides.

Twenty minutes from the terminal

The airport that serves all of this is Chania (CHQ), twenty minutes from town on the Akrotiri peninsula. It is smaller than Heraklion and its European routes are seasonal, so the fare is often higher on the same dates. Pay it anyway if your week is western, because the saving on the flight rarely survives contact with a 155 km transfer taken twice. We set out how long the run into town really takes from CHQ, including the bus and what the taxi rank does when two flights land together.

Rethymno: the base for a trip with no single priority

Rethymno is nobody's first choice for any one thing, which is exactly what recommends it. It has a Venetian old town of its own, smaller and less photographed than Chania's, with a fortress above it and a long sand beach running east from the harbour. Both airports sit about an hour away. Knossos is an hour and a quarter east, Chania fifty minutes west, and the gorges and beaches of the south coast are over the ridge behind the town.

The catch is the beach strip. East of the old town, the coast road carries several kilometres of large hotels aimed at package holidays, and the difference between a room in the old town and a room out there is the difference between two holidays. Check on a map exactly where a Rethymno hotel sits before you book it, because the town name covers both.

Heraklion and the centre: practical, and not much loved

Heraklion gets a bad press from people who spent one night there before a flight. It is a port city with real traffic, a ring of Venetian walls, a magnificent archaeological museum holding everything dug out of Knossos, and a centre that has improved a great deal in the last decade without ever becoming pretty. Nobody comes to Crete for Heraklion. Plenty of people should stay there anyway.

The port is also the reason a Heraklion room is worth more than it looks on a trip that does not begin and end at an airport. The overnight boat from Piraeus ties up here, and sailing down instead of flying buys you a cabin, a night you would otherwise have paid a hotel for, and a car you did not have to hire twice. The same quay sends the fast boats north in the morning, which is how most people bolt a few days in the Cyclades onto a Crete holiday: the crossing to the caldera takes a couple of hours in good weather and is the first thing cancelled when the meltemi gets up, so it belongs in the middle of a trip rather than on the day before a flight home.

The argument is entirely practical. The airport is fifteen minutes away and takes far more flights than Chania, for longer in the year. Knossos is a city bus ride. Rethymno, Matala and Agios Nikolaos are all inside an hour and a quarter, which no other base can claim in both directions. A room here also costs less than the same room anywhere else on this list, which is worth something on a trip built around driving rather than lounging. If you are weighing the two terminals against each other, what landing at HER involves covers the transfers east and west and the car hire desks that sit outside the building rather than in it.

If you want the location without the city, the coast either side offers it. Ammoudara to the west is quieter. Hersonissos and Malia to the east are the island's package and nightlife strip, loud in August and half shut in May, and they are the one part of Crete that consistently disappoints people who booked on a photograph.

Agios Nikolaos and Elounda: where the luxury is

The Gulf of Mirabello, an hour east of Heraklion airport, is where Crete keeps its serious hotels. Elounda has been doing this since the 1970s, and the properties along that shore are the large sea-facing kind with private bays, villa wings and their own jetties. Names like the Elounda Beach Hotel and Blue Palace have been in the guidebooks for decades. Agios Nikolaos, ten minutes down the road, is the town: a lake connected to the sea by a short channel, restaurants around it, and a much broader range of places to sleep.

What you buy with the extra hour from the airport is a coastline that stays calmer than the west in August and a set of hotels with no equivalent elsewhere on the island. What you give up is range. Chania is three hours away from here and Elafonissi is not a day trip at all, so an eastern base only makes sense if the hotel is a large part of the point. Spinalonga, the Venetian island fortress and later leper colony in the bay, is the one excursion everyone does, and the boat leaves from Elounda or from Plaka.

The south coast, for a different holiday entirely

There is no continuous road along the south of Crete. Villages there are reached by dropping over the mountains from the north, one at a time, and a few of them still have no road at all. That is why the south stays quiet in the weeks when the north coast does not, and why the accommodation is small, family-run and closed for half the year.

Matala, on the Messara plain below Heraklion, has the sandstone caves and the reputation left over from the 1960s. Plakias, south of Rethymno, is a wide bay with a laid-back village and Preveli's palm gorge nearby. Paleochora, at the south-western corner, sits on a headland with a beach on each side and the ferry along the coast to Sougia and Loutro. All three are hotter, emptier and slower than anywhere on the north coast, and all three need a car unless you are content to stay put for a week, which is a perfectly good plan here.

Booking without a car

It can be done, and it changes the shortlist completely. Without a car, stay in the centre of Chania, Rethymno or Heraklion and nowhere else. The north coast bus runs between all three throughout the day, the old towns are walkable, and the excursions that matter most are sold as organised days with transport included. Everything outside that pattern, which is to say the south coast, the mountain villages, most of the good beaches and the entire far east, thins out to one bus a day or none.

With a car, the sensible move is often the opposite of what people do. Rather than paying a premium for a room in the middle of the old town and then parking a kilometre away, take somewhere on the edge of town with a space outside it. The drives between the regions add up faster than the map suggests, and that number should decide this more than the room does.

When to book, and what runs out

The scarce things on Crete are not the expensive things. Large resorts adjust their prices and keep selling. The rooms that disappear are the small ones: eight-room houses in the Chania and Rethymno old towns, the handful of places in Loutro and Paleochora, anything well reviewed in Elounda. Those sell out for July and August months ahead and never come back at any price.

May, June, September and October are easier on every count, and they are better months to be on the island: the sea is warm from May to late October this far south, the gorges are open, and the roads are drivable in daylight without sitting in traffic. Winter is a genuinely different island, with most coastal accommodation shut and life back in the towns. For the other Greek islands and how they compare on the same question, the hotels hub sets them out.