The ferry, how it works
Ferries leave from Cirkewwa at Malta's northern tip for Mgarr on Gozo. The crossing takes twenty-five minutes, departures are every forty-five minutes and more frequent in summer, and there are night sailings. A foot passenger ticket is around five euros return, and crucially you only pay on the way back, from Gozo. No booking, you just get on.
The real travel time
This is what people underestimate. From Sliema or St Julian's you first have to reach Cirkewwa, an hour by bus or thirty-five minutes by car, then wait for the ferry, then cross, then move around Gozo. Allow two hours door to door to Victoria, the island's capital. Leaving at eight changes everything; leaving at eleven cuts the day in half.
Ramla Bay, the red beach
This is Gozo's big sandy beach and many consider it the finest in the archipelago. The sand is orange-red, a genuine geological quirk rather than a trick of the light, and Calypso's cave looks down on it. It is reachable by bus from Victoria. In July and August it fills up, but never to Blue Lagoon levels.
Xlendi and San Blas
Xlendi, in the south-west, is less a beach than a seaside village wedged between two cliffs, with restaurants at the water's edge and a bay where you swim off the rocks. San Blas, in the north-east, is a small red-sand beach at the bottom of a very steep slope: the reward for those who make the effort, and there are rarely more than thirty people.
What else there is to do
Victoria and its citadel, which looks over the whole island and takes an hour to see. The Marsalforn salt pans, basins cut into the rock over centuries. And diving: Gozo is one of the Mediterranean's best destinations for it, with sites reachable from shore. If your group has a diver, this is where they will want to go.
Staying the night, or not
Gozo's nightlife bears no comparison to Malta's: a few bars in Victoria and Marsalforn, nothing that closes at four. A night there earns its keep if you want to see the island early, before the day ferries have arrived. For a trip built around nights out, Gozo is a day and you go back to Malta to sleep.