Heraklion airport: where it is and how far your hotel really is
HER is five kilometres from the middle of Heraklion and two hours twenty from Chania. Plenty of people book it for a hotel in the west of Crete, and pay for that with almost five hours of driving they never planned.
Heraklion International Airport, code HER, is the second busiest airport in Greece and the front door to Crete for most of the eight or so million people who pass through it each year. It sits on the coast just east of the city, which makes it superb for Heraklion and the resorts around it, and a genuine problem if your hotel is at the other end of the island. Chania, in the west, is a two hour twenty minute drive away, which is why picking your end of Crete comes before picking your flight.
Where Heraklion airport actually is
The runway runs along the shore at Nea Alikarnassos, five kilometres east of Heraklion town centre and close enough that arriving flights cross the seafront on final approach. Crete, though, is 260 kilometres long. An airport in the middle of the north coast is only central in the sense that a train station in Lyon is central to France. The east of the island is comfortably within an hour. The west is not.
The ferry port is on the same side of town, ten minutes from the terminal by road, and that is worth knowing when the domestic seats out of Athens have gone or cost more than the flight you booked to get to Greece. Taking the overnight boat from Piraeus instead turns the connection into a night's sleep and lands you within sight of the same airport.
Position
How long the transfer takes, by car and by bus
The airport sits on the E75, the north coast road, so anything strung along that road is quick to reach and anything off it is not. The table below covers the bases people actually book.
| From HER to | Distance | By car | By bus | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heraklion centre | 5 km | 15 min | about 15 min | City bus line 1 runs to the port and Liberty Square every few minutes in season |
| Hersonissos | 22 km | 25 min | about 45 min | North-coast KTEL coaches call at the airport, so no need to go into town first |
| Malia | 30 km | 35 min | about 1 h | Same coach line, a few stops further east |
| Agios Nikolaos | 62 km | 55 min | about 1 h 15 | Motorway most of the way, then the descent into the gulf |
| Rethymno | 83 km | 1 h 10 | about 1 h 30 | Westbound coaches are frequent, and the road is the good one |
| Matala | 68 km | 1 h 15 | change in Heraklion | South coast, over the Messara plain. No coach line crosses the island directly |
| Chania | 145 km | 2 h 20 | about 3 h | The transfer people underestimate when they book HER for a Chania hotel |
| Balos | 190 km to Kissamos | 3 h, then a boat or a track | not realistic | A full day out of Heraklion. From Chania it is a morning |
Driving times are for a normal day outside July and August. Add a third to anything on the north coast in peak season, and more on a Friday afternoon. Bus times are the published journey, not the wait: KTEL runs to a seasonal timetable that changes twice a year, so check the day before rather than trusting a figure printed on any website, including this one.
For anyone staying in Heraklion itself, the city bus beats the taxi. Line 1 stops outside the terminal and runs to the port and the middle of town, and it is not affected by the queue at the taxi rank at half past ten at night when four flights land together. Further out, the long-distance KTEL coaches heading east and west along the coast call at the airport rather than only at the bus stations, so a transfer to Hersonissos, Malia or Rethymno does not need a detour into the city first.
Fares and frequencies both move with the season, and the KTEL timetable is reissued twice a year. Treat any figure you read online, this page included, as an order of magnitude and check the operator the day before you travel.
HER or Chania: pick the airport from where you sleep
Crete has two airports that matter, and the flight search that shows you a cheap seat into Heraklion has no idea your hotel is in Kissamos. The rule of thumb is Rethymno: east of it, fly into Heraklion; west of it, fly into Chania.
Where are you actually sleeping?
Middle of the north coast
Fly into HER
No contest. The airport is on the edge of the city, the bus into town takes about as long as walking to the terminal from a remote stand, and Knossos is twenty minutes south.
- Drive from HER
- 15 min
- Drive from CHQ
- 2 h 20
The case that comes up most often is Balos. It is the beach that sells Crete on every social feed, it is at the very north-west tip of the island, and it is a full day out of Heraklion once you have driven three hours to Kissamos and taken the boat or the dirt track. From Chania it is a morning. If Balos and Elafonissi are on your list, a slightly more expensive flight into CHQ is the cheaper trip. Our the same distances laid out across the whole island make that comparison for you, and if the base itself is still open, the rundown of which end of the island to sleep at answers the same question from the other direction: pick the town first, and the airport follows from it.
Renting a car at HER, and the queue nobody warns you about
Crete is an island where a car changes the holiday, and Heraklion is where most people collect one. It is also where the arrivals experience goes wrong most reliably. In July and August the car hire desks are the longest wait in the building, worse than passport control, because several flights land inside the same half hour and every party on them is collecting a vehicle. An hour in that queue is normal. Two happens.
Some of the local firms operate from lots a short shuttle ride away rather than from a desk in the terminal, which sounds worse and is often faster, since the queue is shared between far fewer flights. Whoever you book with, reserve before you fly rather than on arrival: walk-up rates in August on Crete are punishing, and the small automatics sell out first because most of the fleet here is manual.
What the terminal is like in August
Heraklion has one passenger terminal, built for an airport a good deal smaller than the one it became. Seating runs out in the departure hall by mid-morning in August, and the air conditioning loses to a room that full. The pressure is on departure, not arrival. Landing is usually quick: bags come off fast and the walk to the exit is short. Leaving is the part that needs planning.
Allow three hours for a summer departure, and drop the hire car before you join any queue rather than after. Out of season the same building is calm enough that ninety minutes is plenty.
Twenty minutes inland
The name, and the airport that will replace it
The full name is Heraklion International Airport "Nikos Kazantzakis", after the Cretan novelist who wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, and whose grave sits on the Venetian walls above the city under an epitaph about hoping for nothing and fearing nothing. You will see the name written N. Kazantzakis on signage and in timetables, which is why it turns up in searches as a separate airport. It is the same place.
A replacement is being built inland at Kastelli, around forty kilometres south-east, and it is designed to take the whole of the current traffic on a site with room to grow. When it opens, the five kilometre transfer that makes Heraklion so convenient today disappears. Dates have slipped repeatedly, so book around the airport that exists, and expect the north coast resorts to be further from their airport than they are now.
Questions people ask about Heraklion airport
Is Heraklion a small airport?
No, and that is the source of most complaints about it. Heraklion International Airport handles somewhere around eight million passengers a year, which makes it the second busiest in Greece after Athens. What is small is the terminal, a single building sized for a fraction of that traffic and never rebuilt. The result is an airport that feels regional in May and overwhelmed in August, with queues for security, passport control and the car hire desks all happening in the same few hundred square metres.
Is Heraklion a good airport?
It is a convenient airport rather than a comfortable one. Convenient because it is five kilometres from the middle of Heraklion, sits on the coast road that most of the island's resorts are strung along, and has more routes and more airlines than anywhere else in Crete. Uncomfortable because the building is undersized for its own traffic, so the summer departure hall runs out of seats and the air conditioning loses. Arrivals are usually painless; it is the leaving that people remember.
Which Greek island is served by Heraklion airport?
Crete, the largest island in Greece and the fifth largest in the Mediterranean. Heraklion is its capital, on the north coast roughly in the middle, and the airport sits just east of the city at Nea Alikarnassos. Crete is also served by Chania in the west and by a small field at Sitia in the far east, and reachable by ferry from Piraeus, so Heraklion is the main door rather than the only one.
Which airport in Crete is better, Heraklion or Chania?
Whichever one is nearer your bed, because the island is 260 km long and the two airports are 145 km apart. Rethymno is the dividing line: east of it, meaning Heraklion, Knossos, Malia, Agios Nikolaos and Elounda, fly into HER. West of it, meaning Chania town, Kissamos, Balos, Elafonissi and the Samaria gorge, fly into CHQ. Where Heraklion wins outright is choice, with more airlines, more destinations and a schedule that survives the winter. Where Chania wins is calm, since it is a much easier building to leave.
What is inside Heraklion airport, and is there a lounge?
Less than the passenger numbers suggest. There is a duty free shop, a handful of cafes and fast food counters, some newsagents and gift stands, and one pay-per-entry lounge airside that also takes the usual airline and card programmes. Most of it is past security, the seating around it fills by the middle of a summer morning, and prices are airport prices. Eat before you arrive in August rather than counting on finding a table.
Is a new Heraklion airport being built?
Yes, inland at Kastelli, about forty kilometres south-east of the current site, and it is meant to replace it outright rather than sit alongside it. Opening dates have moved several times and Greek infrastructure projects have a habit of moving again, so plan your trip around the airport that exists. When Kastelli does open, transfer times to the north coast resorts will get longer rather than shorter, and the five kilometre hop into Heraklion disappears.
More on getting around the country in our rundown of every Greek gateway.
