OUR CONTRIBUTORS

Anna Mora is a Barcelona native and passionate traveler who runs communications for Anna Mora & Brunella, a Spanish fashion label founded by her mother.

Antonella Tiganelli is a chef, creative director and food artist who co-founded the Poblenou hotspot Masa Vins and the “gastro theater” concept Food Rituals, which has done culinary installations for Soho House Barcelona and Barcelona-based Muses of Now (known for their traveling dinner series for women in the arts). 

Carmen Riestra is a curator and founder of the VASTO, a Barcelona gallery dedicated to supporting and discovering emerging artists and designers.

Gregori Civera is a Barcelona-based photographer who works in long-term documentary projects around built environments as well as commercial/editorial for clients including Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, Wallpaper*, and Monocle. He currently has a show at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) documenting life and change in Barcelona’s suburbs.

Inés Miró-Sans was born in Barcelona and, after working for brands such as Hotel OMM and Ace New York, co-founded Casa Bonay in 2016 (which she had begun as her MBA project a decade earlier). The Barcelona boutique hotel has since won all sorts of awards and is beloved by many of our contributors, below.

Javier Llaudet is the founder of Arrels, Barcelona, a swimwear and clothing brand rooted in Spain. 

Júlia Juste, born and raised in Barcelona, is the founder of Outliers Guide, a website devoted to uncovering exceptional hotels and guesthouses worldwide. 

Jordi Luque is a storyteller with a focus on gastronomy. He is passionate about connecting people through good stories, food and drinks.

Siobhan Reid is a Canadian-born freelance writer based in Barcelona, who writes an excellent Spain-centric Substack. Previously, she was an editor at Travel + Leisure. Her writing can be found in Vogue, Departures, and The New York Times Style Magazine. And she was an enormous help to us in putting together this list, reaching out to a number of her creative contacts on our behalf!

Suzanne Wales is a Barcelona-based writer on design, architecture and lifestyle. When not at her desk, she is showing visitors the latest hot spots and off-the-radar gems through her company Barcelona Design Tours. Her latest book, Made in Spain, is a journey through Spain through local craft and artisan traditions. 

Thao Phuong is a fashion designer who grew up in Melbourne and is now based in Barcelona. After two decades in the fashion industry she founded TextileSeekers, which organizes sustainable textile-focused trips through Vietnam highlighting provenance, craftsmanship and artisanal community heritage. You can read more about TextileSeekers here. 

Tomer Botner was born in Tel-Aviv and has lived in Barcelona since 2015. He is the founder of Florentine Kitchen Knives, where he designs and makes exceptional bespoke cooking tools for some of the world’s most accomplished restaurants and professional and amateur cooks. He is also the co-founder of The Sharpening Shop, a holistic Poblenou-based sharpening service, and host of the Florentine Lunch Club, a monthly gathering of curious palates and minds who explore dishes and wines on Sundays on communal tables at the specious FKK workshop. 

Valeska Idarraga is the co-founder and CMO of Paladar y Tomar, a Spanish boutique DMC that specializes in crafting unique, innovative and inspiring food and wine journeys. They cover Barcelona and all of Catalonia with a special gourmet touch, and run small food and wine group tours in the region that they personally lead every year.

Xavier Franquesa is an interior designer and creative director turned gallerist. In 2010 he founded il·lacions, the first gallery in Barcelona dedicated exclusively to local 21st-century design, creating value and bringing visibility to its more than 60 collaborating creators, exhibiting their furniture and objects, unique pieces or limited series.

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As soon as we finished last year’s Costa Meno Italy, I wanted to jump into the Greek version. Costa Meno is a term we coined to mean “costs less,” and to avoid having to use the ABC words (affordable, budget, cheap). Of course we all want a deal, and places we can afford that are pure and authentic, but we know that typing those ABC words into a search engine will, because of the nature of algorithms, pull up crappy hotels you’d never want to leave home for. And so when thinking of approaching Greece with its more than 200 islands, we needed to take a beat to figure out how best to approach it.

For as long as I’ve been traveling there—since I went on a college program in Kalymnos for a semester!—Greece has always been the land of small, family-owned and reasonably priced guest houses and small hotels. In putting this list together, I kept thinking about how the Grand Tour of the 19th-century aristos, which reached as far as Naples and Taormina (usually only the archaeologists made it as far as Greece!), meant the emergence of old-world grand hotels for them to stay in along the way. It’s a much more recent phenomenon that luxury hotels and their accompanying inflated prices have started dotting the country’s 8,500 miles of coastline. While I love many of these places with their modern architecture, minimalist chic, and insane views, my heart belongs to the rustic and authentic—which, for me, feels truly Greek. You can get that modernist luxury anywhere! 

Like last year, we emailed Greek friends who know these islands, pored through our Greece Travel Planner, our Dodecanese and Cyclades Lists, and researched way past the first couple of Google pages. Our methodology was to price out double rooms during the peak weeks of July 15 and 21 (looking at weekdays, as prices can hike dramatically on weekends), and focused on places that are under 300 euros a night (though we did include a handful that inch above that, because they looked amazing). Most of our picks are small hotels, but we also included rentals when we came across them—we know there is a much larger universe of rentals that become increasingly affordable the more people you add to split the cost, but you don’t need us to find those. We wound up focusing on the islands, as there are so many of them, but at some point we promise we’ll come back around and add the mainland coast and Peloponnese.

When we dug into this project, our friend Nausika Georgiadou, who owns one of our favorite properties, Skinopi Lodge in Milos (not a Costa Meno!), confirmed our hunch about where to search—the islands where Greeks actually still vacation: “The popular islands will be hard, but the lesser-known ones have a lot!” she said. “I was in Skyros last week, in a beautiful little hotel for 150 euros. These are the places the Greeks go to now, and they have the feeling of Greece as it used to be. Personally, I cannot have a holiday in the popular places anymore, with all the black transfer cars, the massive fast ferries, etc…I prefer those beautiful ‘left behind’ places that are not so Instagrammable.” 

Since some of those islands may be less familiar to many (a few were to us!), and because they all attract a different kind of person/interest, we added a little description of each. At the same time, we did manage to dig up a few Costa Meno options on the beaten path—Santorini, Hydra, Patmos—if you still want to go, despite the crowds. But you may need to forget the air conditioner and embrace Greece’s famous summer winds, the meltemi—and anyway, the true luxury is in connecting with real people who own these places and want to share their islands with you, not in ridiculous pillow selections, fluffy bedside foot mats and sushi. With that, here’s our Costa Meno Greece list. —Y.E.

Most recent edit July 2025

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