Seychelles

Seychelles asks no visa of anyone — you’re waved in on a free Visitor’s Permit for up to 90 days. What everyone must do first is buy the Travel Authorisation online, a per-person requirement that even applies to infants. Apply up to a month before travel; approval normally lands within twelve hours, and you carry the confirmation to the airline and the border.

The scam to avoid is the portal. The only official site is seychelles.govtas.com (also reachable through the e-Border app); a cluster of copycat sites with official-looking domains charge a multiple of the ~€10 government fee. The tourism ministry itself has had to warn travellers off them — type the address, don’t follow an ad.

Have your accommodation details and an onward ticket ready for the form, and note the soft proof-of-funds guideline of roughly US$150 a day. None of this is onerous, but it is checked — the TA is genuinely compulsory, not a formality you can sort out on arrival.

• A real town, beaches and a base for day-tripsSkipcommitting to a tiny island for a weekGoMahé — Victoria, Beau Vallon and the Morne Seychellois trails
• The coco de mer forest and headline beachesSkipexpecting it all on MahéGoPraslin — Vallée de Mai, Anse Lazio, Anse Georgette
• The car-free, bicycle, postcard idyllSkiphiring a carGoLa Digue — cycle to Anse Source d’Argent

In high season (and around the April/October sweet spots) the Cat Cocos sailings sell out — book them when you book the rooms, not on the day. The catamaran can be a rough hour in the south-east trade-wind months; if you’re prone to seasickness, the 15-minute flight is the kinder option.

What sets Seychelles apart is the granite: time-smoothed boulders the colour of rose and pewter, bedded into white sand and turquoise shallows. The icons are on La Digue and Praslin — Source d’Argent’s boulder maze, Lazio’s clean curve, Georgette’s quiet crescent — rather than on Mahé, whose Beau Vallon is the everyday swimming bay.

Treat the famous shots with a little realism: Anse Source d’Argent is spectacular but busy, and its water is shallow and weed-strewn at low tide. For an actual swim, Anse Lazio and (if you can book it) Anse Georgette are the better days out.

To stand on Anse Georgette as a non-guest you must email Constance Lémuria ahead — ideally more than a day out — because the resort caps outside visitors at roughly thirty each morning and thirty each afternoon. You can also reach it on foot from Anse Lazio if the booking is full.

The headline prices hide a stack of per-visit conservation fees — the Vallée de Mai, the marine parks off Mahé and Praslin, the La Digue estate gate — and from 2026 a nightly Tourism Environmental Sustainability Levy on top of the room. None is large alone; together, across a week of island-hopping, they are a real line in the budget.

The one genuine change for 2026 is the levy structure: small 1–24-room guesthouses are now exempt (they used to pay a token rate), which quietly rewards the self-catering end of the market over the big resorts. Under-12s are free throughout.

If you’re choosing between a small guesthouse and a large resort, the levy now tilts the maths: the guesthouse dodges the SCR 100-a-night charge the island resort adds per person. Over a fortnight for a family that is not a trivial sum — factor it in alongside the room rate.

The seasons here are set by two monsoons. The south-east trades (May–September) bring cooler, breezier, rougher days — and pile seaweed onto south- and east-facing beaches, so you favour the north and west coasts. The north-west monsoon (November–March) is calmer underfoot but hotter, more humid and wetter, heaviest around December–January.

Between them sit April and October — flat seas, clear water, the islands at their postcard best. If the diving and the water are the point of the trip, those are the weeks to aim for.

On Mahé, a hire car earns its keep: the island is steep and the good beaches are spread around the coast. The public alternative is the SPTC bus, a flat SCR 10 cashless (SCR 12 cash) however far you ride — cheap, if slow and scenic. Praslin is small enough to manage with the odd taxi, though a car opens up Anse Lazio and Anse Georgette.

On La Digue, leave the car behind entirely: the island runs on bicycles — a day’s hire is a few hundred rupees — with ox-carts as the historic curiosity and a handful of taxis for luggage. It’s the one place where car-free isn’t a compromise but the whole charm.

Carry Seychellois rupee cash for the buses, bike hire and small vendors even though resorts, ferries and tours quote in euros or dollars — the one thing a card won’t reliably cover is the local, everyday layer of the trip.

Seychelles is reliably near the top of any “most expensive destinations” list, and the reason is structural: an island nation that imports most of what it consumes, so a casual dinner or a bag of groceries costs what a smart meal would elsewhere. We don’t publish day-rates — they move within a season — but the shape of the market is clear: there is no genuine budget tier, only a self-catering guesthouse floor versus the resort ceiling.

Where the money goes is also predictable — the room, the inter-island ferries, the conservation fees of the previous section, and the nightly sustainability levy. The attractions themselves, beyond the gated parks, are mostly the free granite beaches, which is the one way the islands stay generous.

The practical saving is to self-cater and lean on the guesthouses on Mahé and La Digue: from 2026 they dodge the sustainability levy entirely, and you sidestep resort dining — comfortably the single biggest line after the flights. Keep rupee cash for the bus-and-market layer a card won’t cover.

More than anything, Seychelles trades on endemism. Praslin’s Vallée de Mai grows the coco de mer, the largest seed in the plant kingdom, in a forest so singular it’s a World Heritage Site in its own right. Giant tortoises amble across Curieuse and the resort grounds, and the far atoll of Aldabra — itself World Heritage — holds one of the planet’s great tortoise populations.

In the water, the calendar matters: hawksbill and green turtles nest from October to February, with hatchlings into March, and whale sharks pass in August and again October–November off Mahé. The conservation fees on the previous section are, in effect, what keeps all this intact.

Aldabra is the great Seychelles “someday” — but be clear-eyed: it’s reached only by multi-day expedition cruise, needs a landing clearance, and costs run to roughly €900 a head in fees alone on top of the voyage. For almost every trip, Curieuse and the Vallée de Mai are the realistic way to meet the wildlife.