I visited the glittering Greek island of Mykonos, the summer destination of choice for billionaires - and it's a very different experience if you aren't swimming in money

• Mykonos is a Greek island, world-famous as a party capital and a popular vacation hotspot for millionaires and billionaires.
• I recently visited to see what the island would be like on both a frugal cheap vacation budget and on a more mid- to high-end vacation budget.
• Visiting during the peak summer months of July and August turned out to be an expensive, exhausting, and crowded experience, with every beach packed, lines out the door of most clubs and bars, and resorts that were hard to book and cost a fortune.
• While the resorts and beaches are gorgeous and the bars and clubs fun and lively, Mykonos feels like poor bang-for-your-buck unless you are a hard-partying clubber or drowning in money.
• There are a lot of less crowded, equally beautiful, and far cheaper Greek islands to visit nearby.

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Mykonos is not for the faint of heart.

The island is famous as a glamorous destination for the world's most wealthy and famous. Come the booming summer months of July and August, the island swells with the A-listers, B-listers, C-listers, and D-listers, along with hundreds of thousands of vacationers, hard-partying dance-music junkies, and cruise-shippers.

While just 33 square miles in size, the sunny and cool island is stuffed with hip boutique hotels, thumping beach clubs, haute couture shops, white sandy beaches, whitewashed alleyways, and swanky restaurants.

If this all sounds a little like Ibiza, I'll stop you right there: the cool rich kids have moved on. They're in Mykonos now. If there were any doubts, a look off any bay on Mykonos' coast reveals waters swamped with freshly scrubbed yachts, superyachts, and mega-yachts.

Over the last several years, the number of international arrivals to Mykonos has nearly doubled.

But where does that leave the rest of the teeming masses that jostle for a spot at Mykonos' glittering carnival?

For us, visiting Mykonos is a far different experience. The doors that simply open for the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, Bella Hadid, and billionaire Stavros Niarchos III stay closed for mere mortals. A day at a beach club can empty out a savings account, and that's if you can even score a cabana at all. In the hottest of hot spots, the staff only have time to cater to millionaires and billionaires.

Those were my assumptions before I stepped off the airplane to see what Mykonos is like for regular folks - many of which I found were right by the time I left the island a few days later. Other expectations, I found, were pleasantly incorrect.

Here's what it was like to visit the world's hottest party island in the peak of the season: