A couple contacted me at Concierge Unique in late May one year asking about a villa for the first two weeks of August. They had been looking online for several weeks. They had found properties they liked. They had a budget that would have been entirely adequate in February. In May, it was adequate for what remained after the people who started in February had made their choices, and what remained was a reasonable selection but not the selection they had seen in their searches and assumed was available.

I found them something good. It took longer than it should have, and it cost more than it would have cost earlier in the year, and the terrace they had set their hearts on from the photographs of a property that was no longer available took several conversations to replace with a terrace they were equally pleased about. They had a fine week. But the week they would have had if the conversation had started in January would have been a different and better week, and they knew it by the time they arrived.

I tell this story because it is the most common version of the most common mistake people make when renting a villa in Mykonos. The island looks, at a distance, like a market that rewards decisive action at any reasonable point before the trip. It does not. It rewards starting early in a way that feels slightly absurd when you first encounter it, and then feels entirely logical once you understand what the island is in July and August and how much competition exists for the things that make a stay there genuinely exceptional.

The platform problem

When people begin looking for a villa in Mykonos,…

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