Rhodes

This is the practical warning nobody puts on a booking page. Akandia is a working cargo quay: no waiting area, no shade, no toilets, no food. There is a Blue Star ticket kiosk and that is close to the extent of it. On a July afternoon with a delayed departure, that matters.

It is roughly a 20-minute walk to the Old Town and about 30 minutes to the New Town and the main bus station. Parking is free with a shuttle bus running every half hour, on a reduced timetable on Saturdays and not at all on Sundays — check the day before you rely on it.

Kolona sits right by the entrance to the Old Town, so arriving on a Dodekanisos Seaways catamaran means walking off the boat and into the medieval walls within a few minutes. If you are choosing between two routings to the same island and one lands at Kolona, that is a real convenience worth a small premium.

Very few Greek islands have a regular international ferry. Rhodes has two:

• Marmaris — about 50 minutes, with three or four sailings in our current timetable, operated by Yeşil Marmaris.
• Fethiye — about 85 minutes, a longer run down the Turkish coast.

These are proper border crossings: passports, not identity cards, and the crossing leaves the Schengen area. Build in time on both sides and do not plan a tight onward connection the same day.

From our timetable, the busiest links out of Rhodes:

• Kos — 15 sailings, about 2 h 40 m, on both Blue Star and Dodekanisos Seaways. This is the strongest connection the island has.
• Symi — 6 sailings, around 50 minutes, the classic day trip.
• Piraeus — 6 sailings, and see the next section.
• Kalymnos, Tilos, Chalki and Kastellorizo — the smaller Dodecanese runs, one to three sailings each.
• Santorini — 3 sailings, but a genuinely long crossing at around 13 hours.

People underestimate this one badly. Rhodes sits at the far southeastern corner of the Greek ferry network: Piraeus to Rhodes runs about 12 h 50 m, and the return is a little quicker at roughly 12 h 15 m. It is an overnight ship, and it is the right way to do it — a cabin turns the crossing into the night you would have spent in a hotel anyway.

What it is not is a day trip or a casual add-on to an Athens holiday. If your time is short, fly one leg and sail the other.

These two are the obvious island-hopping bases and they behave differently. Kos is further north and closer to the middle of the chain. Rhodes is the terminus — more connections in absolute terms, but many of them radiate outward rather than passing through.

The 15 sailings on the Kos–Rhodes link mean you do not have to choose exclusively. A common pattern is to fly into one, work along the chain, and fly out of the other.

The full picture — Turkey crossings, the small-island catamarans, the daily Symi boats — belongs to roughly May through September. Outside that the international sailings thin out first, then the smaller Dodecanese runs, leaving the Blue Star ships to Piraeus and Kos as the year-round spine.

Late September is the sweet spot: the sea is still warm, the catamarans are still running, and Akandia's lack of shade stops being a problem.