One island, slowly

Island-hopping is one of those ideas that is much better in the planning than in the doing. Four islands in ten days reads like abundance. In practice it's four check-ins, four check-outs, four ferry timetables, and a running total of maybe two full days spent moving luggage between beds.

Islands are the worst possible geography for a multi-base trip, because the transfers are the least flexible kind: scheduled, weather-dependent, and often once or twice a day.

What the transfers actually cost

A ferry between islands is rarely just the crossing. It's checking out, getting to the port, waiting for the sailing, crossing, arriving, getting to the accommodation, waiting for the room, and unpacking again.

Half a day is a reasonable estimate, and that's when everything runs. When a sailing is cancelled for weather — which on smaller routes is entirely normal — you lose considerably more, and you lose it in a place you were finished with.

What staying gives you

You stop being a visitor around day three. This is the real argument. On a single island for a week, something changes partway through: you know which café opens early, the same people recognise you, you've found the beach that's empty because the road to it looks worse than it is. That doesn't happen in two days anywhere.

You get the weather in aggregate. One bad day out of seven in one place is an inconvenience. One bad day out of two in each of four places can be most of the trip.

You can be idle without guilt. The hidden tax on a packed itinerary is that doing nothing feels like waste, because the clock is running on this island specifically. Staying put removes that pressure entirely, which for a beach trip is the entire point.

You find the interior. Almost every island has an inland that visitors skip — villages, terraces, high roads, older settlements away from the water. It's usually where the place is most itself, and you only get to it once you've stopped needing to be at the port.

When hopping does make sense

There are honest exceptions.

• Very short crossings. Where islands are minutes apart and effectively function as one place, hopping is just moving around.
• Genuinely different islands. Where the geology or character changes sharply — one volcanic and dramatic, one flat and agricultural — two bases can be worth it.
• Long trips. On three weeks, two or three bases is a reasonable rhythm. The rule bites hardest on short trips.

The failure mode is specifically short trips with many stops. Ten days and four islands. Seven days and three.

A workable version

If you want more than one island in a week: two bases, four nights and three nights. One transfer, mid-trip, on a day you've already accepted will be a half-day.

That's the compromise that keeps most of the benefit of staying while still giving you a change of scene.

The leave argument

Islands tend to be the trips people save their biggest block of leave for, which makes the packing-in instinct stronger — having spent ten days of annual leave, there's pressure to see something.

It's worth resisting. The value of a week on one island isn't the number of places you can name afterwards. It's that by day five you've stopped checking the time, which is the thing you actually took the leave for.