Boat trips
Day trips
The island
A quad on Kos is either the best morning of your holiday or the reason you spend the rest of it in a clinic. This guide compares a guided jeep or quad off-road tour against hiring a quad yourself, and says plainly what "off-road" means on an island of graded farm tracks.
Bookable now
What you're seeing: real departures for the coming weeks, pulled from GetYourGuide. Sort by duration or price, then open the listing to see whether you drive the quad or ride as a passenger.
Quick summary
These are the questions people ask at the rental desk with a card already out. The desk is a bad place to discover what your cover excludes.
| Guided jeep or quad tour | Commonly €60–110 per person, often with drinks and lunch. Driving a quad costs more than a jeep seat. |
|---|---|
| Quad hired by the day | Roughly €30–70 per machine per day, cheaper from three days. Fuel is not included. |
| Horse riding on the beach | Usually €45–80 per person for a 1–2 hour escorted ride. |
| Driving licence | Required. Most firms take a full car licence; some want a motorcycle entitlement. |
| Helmets | Wear one. Greek law requires helmets on motorcycles and mopeds; good firms supply them and check the fit. |
| Minimum age | Typically 18 or 21 to drive. Young children are often refused as passengers. |
| Deposit and damage excess | A card pre-authorisation plus an excess written into the contract, often many times the daily rate. The commonest cost shock on Kos. |
| Time to allow | Guided tour 4–6 h · self-hire a full day · beach ride 2–3 h with transfer. |
| Advance booking | Yes for guided tours in July–August; vehicle numbers are limited. Quad hire is walk-in, but the good machines go by mid-morning. |
Bands are ranges from publicly listed prices, not quotes. How we source numbers.
Said plainly: quads hurt people
Quad and scooter crashes are among the commonest serious accidents involving holidaymakers on Greek islands, and national travel-advice services warn about them specifically. Loose gravel, bare legs and a passenger who leans the wrong way do most of the damage. If you have never driven one, the guided tour is the safer purchase, not the timid one.
Option comparison
Three different days at similar money. The question is how much risk and paperwork you want in exchange for freedom.
Option 1
€60–110 / person, half or full day
Pick this if you have never driven a quad, or you would rather someone else owned the risk and found the good tracks.
Option 2
€30–70 / machine per day, fuel extra
Pick this if you have real riding experience and you read contracts before signing them.
Option 3
€45–80 / person, 1–2 hours
Pick this if you want the coastline at walking pace, or a quad is simply not your idea of a holiday.
What to wear
Closed shoes, long shorts or trousers, sunglasses, and a layer you do not mind ruining. Dust reaches your hair, ears and phone case. Sun cream goes on the backs of your hands and your knees — the two places every quad rider burns.
Expectations
It means graded dirt and gravel tracks: farm roads through olive groves, unsurfaced lanes climbing into the foothills below Mount Dikeos, dusty spurs towards the Kefalos headland. Not rock crawling, not dunes, not mud. Kos is a farmed, walked-over island, not a rally stage.
Good news for nervous drivers, bad news for anyone booking off a promotional video. The interest is in the views and the washboard surface. The loosest sections are the climbs inland from Pyli and Asfendiou, where the gravel turns marble-sized and the drop is on your right.
Beaches, dunes, dry riverbeds and protected wetland are off limits, as is anything inside an archaeological site or a fenced Natura 2000 area. Riding the sand at Tigaki or the scrub beside the Alikes salt lake gets reported.
The quieter restriction is in your own contract: many rental agreements void cover on unsurfaced roads. Read that next to the phrase "quad safari". Ask which tracks are permitted, get the answer written down, or take the guided tour where the operator carries the risk.
Machines are handed over with a token amount of fuel and expected back the same way. Fill up on the main road, keep the receipt, and ask when the card pre-authorisation is released — "a few days" can mean the end of the billing month.
Timing
May, early June and late September. Tracks are dry but the air is not yet an oven. July and August are hard work on an open vehicle: no shade, and a metal seat you cannot sit on if you park in the sun.
Morning departures every time — firmer tracks, better light, and you are off the machine before the afternoon heat. Tuesday to Thursday are quietest. If you are hiring, collect at opening: the well-maintained machines are gone by 09:30 in high season.
The meltemi, the north wind that builds through summer afternoons and peaks in July and August, will not cancel a land tour. It will fill the air with grit on the exposed north-coast tracks and the airport plateau at Antimachia. On a strong meltemi day, ride inland or south — the ground behind Kardamena and Kefalos is sheltered.
The first two hours after sunrise on the tracks above Zia, with the north coast and the Turkish mainland stacked behind you. The same slope faces the sunset in the evening — but by then the coaches have arrived.
| Way to do it | Budget |
|---|---|
| Public bus plus a walk | €2–6 |
| Bicycle hire for a day | €6–15 |
| Quad shared by two, plus fuel | €20–45 |
| Escorted beach ride | €45–80 |
| Guided jeep or quad tour | €60–110 |
Ranges compiled from publicly listed operator prices on GetYourGuide and typical resort hire boards for the current season. Confirm before you pay.
Two on one quad
A quad is priced per machine, so sharing is the cheapest way to do it — and the configuration involved in most incidents. The passenger has nothing to hold, no control over the lean and no view of the surface ahead. If you share, agree a speed limit out loud before you set off.
Practical access
Six things to do at the desk, in order. Together they remove almost every dispute we hear about.
Your travel insurance may not cover you
Plenty of standard travel policies exclude quads and motorcycles outright, or require the correct licence category for the vehicle. Check the wording before you leave home, not from a hospital bed. On a guided tour the operator's own insurance applies, which is a large part of what you are paying for.
How to save
Daily quad rates drop from the third day, so a three-day total is sometimes lower than two days bought separately. And one small hire car is cheaper than two quads for a family of four.
On guided tours the jeep passenger seat is the cheapest place on the trip and the quad driver's seat the dearest. Families often split it: one adult drives, the rest ride in the support vehicle. Ask whether the operator prices the seats separately.
Guided tours normally publish a child rate for jeep passengers, and very young children are refused for safety rather than priced. Nobody discounts quad hire for students or seniors. There is no island-wide activity pass on Kos, so price any bundle against its parts.
Most of what a quad tour shows you is reachable by bicycle, bus and boots. Kos Town is flat and laced with separated cycle lanes, and the peacock forest at Plaka and the climb up Mount Dikeos cost nothing. Add the free thermal pool at Embros Therma and you have a full day for the price of a bus ticket.
How to get there
Guided tours are pickup-based rather than tied to one meeting point. Self-hire is the opposite: you collect in your own resort, and range is whatever you are willing to ride.
Most operators collect along the north coast and in Kos Town, looping through Tigaki, Marmari and Mastichari. Pickup can add an hour at each end — first on the minibus means last off it.
Quad and scooter shops cluster in Kos Town, Kardamena, Tigaki and Mastichari. Renting where you sleep removes the transfer and lets you return the machine late. The resort guide shows where each of those sits.
Zia and the Dikeos foothills 20–25 minutes; Antimachia and the airport plateau 30–35; Kardamena about 40; Kefalos nearer 45. On a quad add a third to all of those.
The airport sits mid-island at Antimachia, roughly 24 km from Kos Town, so a same-day tour only works on a morning arrival. Sort the transfer into your resort first and book the tour for day two.
Context
Kos runs about 40 km end to end and, unusually for the Dodecanese, most of it is flat and fertile. The eastern third rises into the ridge of Mount Dikeos, 846 m at the summit and the island's high point, carrying the Asfendiou villages — Zia among them — on its northern slope. Between ridge and sea it is farmland: olives, vines, figs and grazing goats.
The dirt roads a quad tour uses are those farms' access lanes, plus older routes that linked villages before the coast road existed. Palio Pyli, an abandoned Byzantine hill village with a ruined castle on the northern flank of the ridge, is reached by exactly this kind of track, which is why a decent tour finishes somewhere genuinely old rather than at a viewpoint car park.
The other thing to understand is water. Kos has no rivers worth the name, so the interior is green in April and scorched by August. That swing is the real difference between a spring tour and a high-summer one, and the nature and hiking guide covers what it does to the landscape.
Land activities have grown here for a commercial reason: the island's boat scene is saturated. A morning on the tracks pairs neatly with an afternoon swim, and it is the standard way to see the interior without committing to a hire car. If you are still assembling the week, start from the things to do hub or the boat trip guide and drop one land day into the middle of it.
FAQ
Yes. A quad is a registered road vehicle in Greece, so carry a valid driving licence. Which category counts varies by machine and firm: most accept a full car licence, some insist on a motorcycle entitlement. Check whether your own licence needs an International Driving Permit in Greece.
Wear one whatever the shop says. Greek road law requires helmets on motorcycles and mopeds, police enforce it, and every reputable quad firm on Kos hands them out with the machine. If the helmet rocks on your head, ask for another size.
Resort hire boards typically show around €30–70 per machine per day, falling from the third day, with fuel extra. A guided jeep or quad off-road tour runs higher, commonly €60–110 per person, because it includes a guide, insurance, drinks and often lunch.
For most visitors, yes. A guided tour puts a lead vehicle in front of you, sets a sane pace, carries the insurance and uses tracks the operator knows are legal. Self-hire wins on freedom and cost if two of you share, but you take on the damage excess and the route-finding.
Quad and scooter crashes are among the commonest serious accidents involving holidaymakers in Greece, and several national travel-advice services warn about them by name. The pattern is loose gravel, bare legs and a passenger shifting weight in a bend. Check that your travel insurance covers you on a quad, because many policies do not.
No. Beaches, dunes, dry riverbeds, archaeological sites and protected wetland are off limits, and riding on sand is illegal. What is open to you is the network of graded dirt and gravel farm tracks inland. Check your contract too, because many agreements void insurance on unsurfaced roads.
It is the best alternative on the island if you want the coast without the noise. Escorted rides run one to two hours with an instructor, take complete beginners, and are usually scheduled early or late to dodge the heat. No licence, no deposit, no dust.
Check live availability, inclusions and cancellation terms for guided quad and jeep off-road tours on GetYourGuide — the authorised reseller we link to throughout this guide.
