Santorini. A small airfield, a very deep caldera, and one road to Oia.

Santorini's airport is a single runway shared with the airlines, and in July and August it is one of the busier fields in the Aegean for its size. Private arrivals are slot controlled through the season and ground time is capped at around forty minutes in the middle of the day, which means the aircraft lands, unloads and leaves, and any turnaround plan that assumes it will sit and wait needs rethinking. Handling on the field is straightforward and the walk from aircraft to car is short, which is the compensation.

For a European trip the common shape is the long leg into Athens and a short sector across, either in the same aircraft or in something smaller, and helicopters do a lot of this work in high summer precisely because they are not competing for the same slots. From Mykonos it is twenty minutes or so. See Santorini airport, Athens airport, Athens handling and helicopter charter.

Santorini's road network was built for a quiet island and now carries a very busy one. Oia's centre is pedestrian, so cars set down at the edge of the village and guests walk in, and in the ninety minutes before sunset the approach road and every parking area near it are saturated. Anyone with a dinner reservation in Oia at sunset should be leaving Fira far earlier than the map suggests, or should be arriving by water. Cruise days add their own pattern: tenders land at the old port below Fira and the cable car queue and the town fill for a few hours around the middle of the day.

The practical answer is a car and chauffeur held for the day rather than a series of separate transfers, so that the vehicle is already in the right place when you decide to move. For a villa on the caldera rim the access lane is often narrow and stepped, and knowing where a vehicle can actually turn is the difference between a graceful arrival and a reverse down a hill with luggage.

The caldera is a flooded volcanic crater and it is extremely deep right up to the cliff, so the usual Mediterranean habit of dropping anchor off the town does not work here. Yachts use the mooring arrangements the local boatmen operate in front of Fira and Oia, or lie off and run tenders in to Ammoudi below Oia or to the old port below Fira. The island's own marina, on the south coast at Vlychada, is small and shallow by superyacht standards, so most large vessels treat Santorini as a day or overnight stop in a wider Cyclades itinerary rather than a base.

That makes the land arrangements matter more than usual. We will have a car at Ammoudi when the tender lands, hold it through dinner in Oia and bring guests back down afterwards, and coordinate the day the yacht moves on to Mykonos or across to Bodrum. See yacht charter, crewed charter and catamarans.