An independent guide — Leisure Isle
About our Leisure Isle guide
A straight answer to one question: should you stay on Leisure Isle?
Photo by Kent Wang, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Why this site exists
A small island that repays
a bit of planning
Most accommodation sites will show you every place to stay in Knysna and leave you to work out the difference between them. But Knysna is not one place. The town, Thesen Island and Leisure Isle are three quite different propositions, and a booking site that treats them as one list is not helping you choose — it is just handing you a map and a filter.
This site covers one of them. Leisure Isle is a residential island suburb sitting in the Knysna estuary, joined to the mainland by a causeway off George Rex Drive, and staying there is a genuinely different holiday from staying in the middle of town. That one causeway is the only way on and off, so nobody drives across the island to get anywhere else — the streets carry the people who live there and very little else.
It is houses and water rather than shops and restaurants. The Steenbok Nature Reserve occupies a corner of it — seventeen hectares, free to enter and open at all times, run jointly by the island's residents' association and the municipality, and part of the greater Knysna Protected Environment. And the water moves: at high tide it laps the top of the seawalls, at low tide broad sandflats and saltmarsh open out around the shore. Which of those you get depends on the hour you walk down, and it is the single most practical thing to know before you book.
So this site does the other half of the job: it says what this island is actually like to stay on — who it suits, who it does not — and then shows you what there is to stay in on it. Some of that is unglamorous. There are a few small places to eat on the island, enough for a coffee or a quiet dinner, but nothing like a choice; for that you drive into Knysna, which is not far. If a week without a restaurant strip on the doorstep sounds wrong to you, that is a useful answer too, and we would rather give you it here than take a commission on a week you spend wishing you were somewhere else.
It is put together by one person — Craig Sandeman — not a travel company. The point of it is to be genuinely useful rather than merely exhaustive.
How we work
Four rules we hold to
Written down so you can hold us to them
We show our working
Every property here is a real listing you can go and check. We tell you where our information comes from, and where it stops being reliable.
No prices, on purpose
We publish no nightly rates or availability anywhere. We hold no dependable price data, and a stale figure is worse than none — so we send you to Booking.com for the number that actually counts.
Nobody pays to be listed
No hotel, guest house or self-catering owner has paid to appear here or to rank higher. Our commission comes from Booking.com and is the same whichever place you choose.
The place, not just the beds
Where to stay is really a question about where you want to be. So we write about the island, the lagoon and the water as much as about the rooms.
The honest bit
What this site is,
and what it isn't
We'd rather you knew the shape of this thing before you trust it with a holiday.
- 1We're not a booking agent. We take no payment, hold no reservation, and can't change or cancel one. You book with Booking.com and the property.
- 2We don't own or manage any of these places, and we've no commercial tie to any of them.
- 3We haven't stayed anywhere on this island or inspected anything on it. Nobody from this site is based in Knysna. We read, compare and write — we don't vet.
- 4Our listings come from Booking.com's inventory for Leisure Isle — so a house let privately or through a local agent won't appear here. We're a good map, not a complete one.
- 5We earn a commission when you book through us. It costs you nothing extra, and it's the same whichever place you pick.
- 6Guest scores are Booking.com's own. Only someone who booked through Booking.com can leave one, and recent reviews count for more in the total. The descriptions and the opinions here are ours, and we publish no guest's words.
The full detail is in our affiliate disclosure and our reviews policy.
Not sure the island is right for you?
Tell us roughly what you're after: somewhere on the water, somewhere the children can be let loose, somewhere close to the beach at low tide. We'll give you a straight answer, including if the answer is that you'd be happier in town. Corrections and photographs from owners are welcome too.