Greece airports: which one, and what the code means

Every airport worth knowing, in one table

Codes first, because a booking page shows you three letters and assumes you know them. The last two columns are the ones that change a trip: how far the airport actually is from the town people mean when they say the island's name, and whether anything flies there directly from Europe once the summer ends.

Athens is the hub, and everything else is a spoke

ATH is the only Greek airport that works like a hub, and understanding that saves a lot of confused searching. It takes the long-haul arrivals, it holds the domestic network that fans out to the islands, and it sits on a metro line that reaches Syntagma in about forty minutes. Thessaloniki, SKG, is a real international airport and the right way into Halkidiki and the north, but it is not a second island hub. Almost nothing flies from there to the Cyclades.

Everywhere else is a spoke, and a spoke exists on somebody else's timetable. Rhodes, Corfu, Heraklion and Chania are busy enough to carry European traffic through the winter, thinly. The rest fill up with charters and low-cost routes for the season and then go quiet. An island airport with twenty European destinations in July can have none at all in December, while still running its three flights a day to Athens.

The practical consequence is the same one that catches people out with boats. Island to island flights barely exist. A handful run in summer, Rhodes to Kos, Heraklion to Rhodes, Crete to Thessaloniki, but two islands within sight of each other usually have no air link whatsoever. If your plan involves more than one island, the network you are actually using is the ferry network, and the plane is only there to get you in and out of the country.

The codes nobody explains

Greek IATA codes are unusually unhelpful, because a lot of them were assigned to a place name that English speakers never use. JTR is Santorini, from Thira, the island's actual Greek name. JMK is Mykonos. HER is Heraklion and CHQ is Chania, which are both on Crete and 140 km apart. RHO is Rhodes, CFU is Corfu from Kerkyra, EFL is Kefalonia, ZTH is Zakynthos, and KGS is Kos.

Two of them are traps rather than curiosities. PVK is not on Lefkada. It is Aktion, on the mainland near Preveza, and Lefkada is joined to the coast by a causeway and a floating bridge, so the island has no airport of its own and never needed one. Anyone searching for a Lefkada airport finds nothing and concludes the island is unreachable, which it is not. The other is ZTH, marketed everywhere as Zante: same island, different name, same runway.

The smaller Cycladic strips follow the J pattern too, which is worth knowing when a flight search returns something you do not recognise. JNX is Naxos, JSY is Syros, JSI is Skiathos, JKH is Chios. Paros is PAS and Milos is MLO, both of them small terminals that mostly see domestic turboprops. If you want to see how far apart any two of these places really are, the maps put every island at its real coordinates.

The islands with no airport at all

Plenty of the islands people specifically want to see have no runway at all. Ios, Sifnos, Serifos, Folegandros, Amorgos, Koufonisia, Antiparos, Hydra, Spetses, Poros and Symi are all in that group, and in several cases the island is too small or too steep to ever get one. Hydra goes further and bans cars as well, which is a large part of why it looks the way it does.

None of that makes them hard to reach. It makes them a two-stage journey: a flight into Athens or a neighbouring island, then a boat. Ios sits on the same Piraeus line as Santorini. Sifnos and Serifos share the western Cyclades line with Milos. Hydra, Poros and Spetses are Saronic islands, close enough to Athens to be day trips. Amorgos is the long one, and worth the effort for exactly that reason.

Paros and Milos sit in an awkward middle category that trips up a lot of planning. Both have an airport, both are served from Athens all year, and both get a thin scatter of seasonal European flights that appear and disappear from one summer to the next. Treat them as ferry islands with a useful backup runway rather than as places you can reliably fly into direct.

Corfu, CFU

Two airports, or somebody else's

Crete is the one island where the choice is genuinely consequential. The island is 260 km end to end, and its two airports are at opposite ends of the part you will be staying in. Heraklion, HER, is the busier one, and it is the correct answer for Knossos, Malia, Agios Nikolaos, Elounda and the whole east. Chania, CHQ, is smaller and far less stressful to leave, and it is the correct answer for Chania town, Rethymno, Elafonissi and Balos. Book the wrong one and you have added a two to three hour drive at each end of the holiday.

Lefkada uses Preveza, PVK, and the drive from the terminal to the island is short but the bridge is the only way on, so it queues in August. Halkidiki uses Thessaloniki. Meteora, Delphi and most of the mainland archaeology use Athens, and so does the whole Peloponnese unless Kalamata, KLX, happens to have a seasonal route from your city, which is worth checking because it removes a three hour drive.

For everything else the rule is simpler than it looks. If the island is big enough to have resorts you have heard of, it probably has a runway. If it is a name you found on someone else's photograph, it probably does not, and the question to ask is which line the boat runs on rather than which airline flies there.

The transfer nobody budgets for

An island airport being on your island does not mean it is near where you sleep, and this is the single most reliable source of unpleasant surprise in a Greek holiday. Santorini airport is a quarter of an hour from Fira and closer to three quarters from Oia once the sunset traffic starts. Kos airport is at Antimachia, in the middle of the island, roughly half an hour from Kos Town and about the same again from Kefalos at the far end. Heraklion to Elounda is over an hour.

Public transport off these airports ranges from decent to nonexistent. Athens has a metro and a 24 hour express bus. Heraklion, Chania, Rhodes and Corfu have real bus links into town. On the smaller islands you get a taxi rank that empties within minutes of a flight landing, and after the last arrival of the evening it may not refill. Prebooked transfers and hire cars solve this; hoping solves it less often.

Whether you need a car at all is decided by the island rather than by taste. Santorini, Mykonos and Rhodes Town work fine without one. Crete, Rhodes beyond the town, Kefalonia, Naxos and Corfu are large enough that not having a car means seeing a fraction of them. Where you do want one, collecting it at the airport is almost always cheaper than having it delivered, and in high season the island fleets are genuinely finite.

What happens in winter

The European season runs roughly April to October and thickens sharply through July and August. Direct routes from northern Europe to the islands are built around that curve, they appear in the spring, and they come off the schedule again in the autumn without much notice. Next summer's flights go on sale in stages over the winter, so a trip planned very early only ever sees part of what will eventually exist.

Out of season, almost every island journey becomes a connection through Athens. That is not a disaster, and the domestic flights keep running to most island airports all year, but it changes the arithmetic. A four hour direct flight in July turns into a flight plus a wait plus a second flight in February, and the last domestic departure of the day is early enough that a delayed arrival into Athens can strand you overnight.

Two habits absorb most of the risk. Leave real time between a connecting flight and the one before it, especially on the way home, because a missed domestic leg out of an island with three departures a day is not a same-day problem to solve. And if you are combining a flight with a boat, put the night in Athens between them rather than trusting a morning ferry to land in time for an afternoon departure.

Airport by airport

General rules stop helping once you know which terminal you are landing in. Each of these covers one airport: what the arrivals hall is like, how you get out of it, what the transfer really costs in time, and which mistake people make there.

• Athens Airport: Metro, Buses and Ferry ConnectionsAthens International Airport is 33 km east of the centre. How the metro, the X95 bus and taxis compare, and why Rafina beats Piraeus for a same-day ferry.
• Chania Airport (CHQ): The Guide to Crete's WestChania International Airport CHQ sits 14 km from town on Akrotiri. What it serves, how long everything takes, and when Heraklion is the better bet.
• Heraklion Airport (HER), Crete: Transfers and Car HireWhere Heraklion airport sits on Crete, the drive to Chania, Rethymno and Malia, the bus into town, and when to fly into CHQ instead.
• Kefalonia Airport (EFL): Transfers and Drive TimesKefalonia airport sits 9 km south of Argostoli, not inside it. Drive times to every resort, why the island needs a car, and when the flights stop.
• Kos Airport (KGS): Where It Is and Transfer TimesKos airport sits at Antimachia in the middle of the island, 24 km from Kos Town. Transfer times to every resort, the bus reality and the winter gap.
• Santorini Airport (JTR): Transfers to Fira and OiaSantorini Thira National Airport sits on the east coast, 6 km from Fira. Transfer times to every village, why flights are delayed, and when to leave.