Three Santorini Resorts, Compared Side by Side

Part of The FHR Series

For most hotel comparisons, there’s a problem that’s impossible to avoid: you’re comparing disjointed memories. One property may have been visited in spring and another in peak summer. One stay might follow a long-haul flight, while another begins after a relaxed weekend away. The weather, your mood and even the purpose of the trip are all different. By the time you compare two hotels, you’re often comparing far more than the hotels themselves.

This trip should remove many of those variables. Over a coming long weekend we’ll spend one night at each of three Santorini resorts: Vedema, Katikies Garden and Magma Resort. The same travelers, the same weekend, the same weather and the same Amex FHR program.

Changing hotels every morning might normally be considered a drawback. For this trip, it’s the whole point. Rather than trying to decide months later which hotel we preferred, we’ll experience all three within roughly 72 hours. Every breakfast, every dinner, every pool, every room and every interaction should still be fresh in our minds.

This wasn’t originally intended to become a hotel-focused trip. The plan was simply a long weekend in Santorini, but the hotel search quickly surfaced some interesting contrasts.

Vedema offered something very different from the stereotypical Santorini image. Instead of dramatic caldera views, it sits within the traditional village of Megalochori. Katikies Garden combined a restored monastery with one of the island’s best-known restaurants. Magma looked more contemporary, almost as though Hyatt had created its own interpretation of what a Santorini resort should be. NOŪS also remained firmly in contention throughout, offering attractive pricing and generous FHR benefits.

None of them looked like a poor choice, which made narrowing the shortlist surprisingly difficult. Rather than choosing one and wondering whether another might have been better, we decided to compare them directly.

Resorts also change the way I think about hotel spending. When I’m city-traveling, the hotel is mostly somewhere comfortable to sleep while I spend most of the day elsewhere. A resort, however, becomes a major part of the destination itself, so breakfast, the pool and the restaurants all carry more weight. Spending an afternoon doing very little suddenly becomes part of the experience you’ve paid for.

Around US$500 per night is close to the upper end of what I’m generally comfortable treating as a cash-equivalent hotel cost. Resorts are one of the few exceptions because the property itself becomes part of the holiday rather than simply somewhere to stay.

The timing of the trip wasn’t entirely accidental. Three prepaid American Express FHR credits were due to expire on 30 June, so all three bookings were made during the final few days before expiry.

The credits have now all posted successfully, but that doesn’t make the US$900 free. Each US$300 credit has an opportunity cost because it could have been used for a different FHR stay later in the year. The credits obviously reduced the bill; the more interesting question was whether Santorini represented one of the stronger uses of three scarce semi-annual benefits.

Importantly every stay includes breakfast for two together with a meaningful property credit. For us, those dining credits are often more valuable than they first appear. A substantial resort breakfast usually removes any desire for lunch, making it perfectly natural to use the included credit over dinner instead. Instead of simply discounting the room rate, the benefits help create a complete resort stay.

Vedema and NOŪS both participate in Marriott Bonvoy. We also both hold Marriott Platinum status, have a healthy Bonvoy balance and currently hold 85,000-point Free Night Certificates that remain valid until well into Q4.

Marriott Platinum also narrowed much of the gap between booking direct and booking through Fine Hotels + Resorts. Breakfast, room upgrades and late checkout are already possible through Marriott, although resorts aren’t subject to the same guaranteed 4pm checkout policy as many other brands.

Wanting always to consider whether I’m itemizing the tools in my travel toolkit for a particular stay, I checked whether 85k FNCs or points could have been put to better use here instead.

Using Frequent Miler’s current Reasonable Redemption Value of 0.77 cents per Marriott point, neither redemption looked particularly attractive.

Redeeming 88,400 Bonvoy points for a US$402 room means using points valued at around US$681. Likewise, redeeming 83,000 points for a US$465 stay consumes points with an approximate value of US$639.

An 85k FNC would comfortably cover NOŪS and almost cover Vedema with a modest points top-up. But either way the certificate would only be replacing a room costing US$402-465. With both certificates remaining valid well into Q4, there was no urgency to accept relatively modest value in July.

The additional value from Fine Hotels + Resorts therefore came primarily from the property credits, guaranteed late checkout and noon check-in where available. Combined with the weak redemption values, that tipped the balance decisively towards Fine Hotels + Resorts.

With Marriott largely ruled out, four Fine Hotels + Resorts properties remained.

From an economic standpoint, the finalists were quite similar.

Nightly rates sat within roughly US$70 of one another. Every property included breakfast. Every property came with a meaningful Fine Hotels + Resorts package. At this point, price stopped being the deciding factor.

Vedema promised a quieter, more traditional side of Santorini. Katikies Garden looked closest to the classic luxury Santorini experience, combining its historic setting with Selene restaurant and wine tasting. Magma offered something entirely different again: a contemporary resort where we expected to spend as much time enjoying the property as exploring the island.

NOŪS survived almost until the end. It was sometimes the cheapest of the four finalists while still offering a US$150 dining credit and complimentary airport transfer. Ultimately, though, it didn’t feel uniquely Santorini. Looking through the photography, it felt like somewhere I could happily stay almost anywhere in the Mediterranean, whereas the other three felt like places I’d specifically travel to Santorini to experience.

Choosing the three resorts was only part of the exercise because the order affected the overall cost. I had assumed all three properties would fluctuate in price across the weekend, making the sequencing another optimization problem. In practice, it turned out to be much simpler.

Vedema and Magma were priced identically on all three nights. Katikies Garden, however, increased in price on the Sunday.

Katikies Garden belonged on either Friday or Saturday. Booking it on Sunday would have added further cost for exactly the same room and the same benefits. Once that was fixed, the rest became more about the rhythm of the weekend than the maths.

We eventually settled on:

Beginning in Megalochori feels like a gentler introduction to Santorini before moving into the busier atmosphere of Fira. Magma then provides a final day that’s less about sightseeing and more about simply enjoying the resort before our evening flight back to London.

Its larger food and beverage credit also feels particularly well suited to the final afternoon.

There was another practical advantage to moving hotels every day. Fine Hotels + Resorts benefits are generally awarded once per stay, not once per night.

Hotels frequently regard consecutive reservations at the same property as a single stay, even if they’re booked on separate Platinum Cards or even under different guests’ names. Separate bookings therefore don’t necessarily produce multiple dining credits or multiple sets of benefits. Some hotels are generous about this. Others treat consecutive bookings as one stay regardless of how they’re made.

By moving between three different resorts, there is no ambiguity. Each reservation is unquestionably its own stay, meaning each should receive its own breakfast benefit, property credit and FHR privileges. The logistical inconvenience of changing hotels each morning actually aligns quite neatly with how the program is designed.

The resulting bookings look like this.

In practice, we expect each stay to settle into a similar rhythm: arrive during the afternoon, spend time enjoying the resort, use the property credit over dinner, then move on after breakfast the following morning. If that works, each one-night stay should still feel surprisingly complete.

This isn’t intended to become three independent hotel reviews. The value comes from experiencing them close enough together that meaningful comparisons become possible.

Among the things we’ll be paying particular attention to are:

Some comparisons will inevitably be subjective. Others should be much easier to judge. If one breakfast is clearly better than another, or one property credit proves significantly easier to use, those are useful observations regardless of personal taste.

Likewise, if moving hotels every morning becomes more hassle than it’s worth, that’s an equally valuable conclusion. We will deliberately pack light, plan on taxis between properties, and expect each move to take around 20–30 minutes. Whether that proves effortless or annoying is one of the questions this experiment should answer.

Most hotel reviews try to answer a straightforward question: what was this hotel like? I’m hoping to answer a slightly different one: which of these would I book again for the same trip?

Those aren’t always the same thing. A hotel can be excellent yet still not be the best fit for a particular trip. Equally, the property with the most spectacular views might not offer the strongest overall experience once location, dining, benefits and value are considered together. That’s why we decided to compare them this way.

By the Monday evening we’ll have experienced three luxury resorts under almost identical conditions, with every impression still fresh. Once the trip is over, I’ll compare room upgrades, breakfasts, property credits, atmosphere, the practical impact of changing hotels every morning, and ultimately which I’d book again for the same trip.

With the Fine Hotels + Resorts credits factored in, the prices converged surprisingly quickly. The real challenge was deciding which experiences we wanted to compare.

In the end, this weekend has become something slightly different from the holiday we originally planned. Rather than simply spending three nights in Santorini, we’ll be comparing three distinct resort experiences while almost every other variable remains constant.

We’ll soon find out whether that was a brilliant idea or an exhausting one. I have a feeling it’ll be a little of both.

Why I Paid Cash for our Santorini Flights [to come]

Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts: Where it Works and Where it Doesn’t

How I Chose a Luxury Hotel for a 16-Hour Layover