Thessaloniki airport, and the road to Halkidiki

Getting out of the terminal

At SKG the right way out depends on two things at once: where you are going and what time you land. The city has a good bus until late evening and a fixed taxi fare after it. Halkidiki has buses too, but from a different bus station, and the last ones to Sithonia leave before most evening flights have landed. Pick both below.

SKG and Halkidiki on one map

The airport sits at Mikra, on the flat shore of the Thermaic Gulf, with its main runway pushed a kilometre out into the sea. From the terminal the Moudania expressway runs south through the new suburbs and the farmland to the neck of Kassandra. After Nea Moudania the dual carriageway ends, and every peninsula is ordinary two-lane road from there on. The map below is drawn like the rest of our maps of Greece, from the real coastline, with drive times rather than distances.

Position

To Halkidiki by bus: two legs, not one

Several of the pages that rank for this question describe a direct bus from the airport to Halkidiki. We checked the operator's own stop list and timetables: there is no Halkidiki bus from the terminal. The KTEL Chalkidikis buses all leave from their own bus station at Pylaia, on the Moudania road near IKEA and the Cosmos mall, about 8 km from the airport. Two city lines, 79A and 79K, were set up to link the airport with that station, and neither has a timetable any more.

So the first leg is a taxi, 12 to 15 minutes, or city bus 79 from the airport to the IKEA stop and line 36 onwards to the bus station. The second leg is the KTEL bus itself, and it is decent to Kassandra and thin to everywhere else:

The tower at Nea Fokea, just past the neck of Kassandra. The first peninsula is the nearest to the airport and the only one with a bus every hour or so. Photo: Tryfon Manolis, CC BY-SA 4.0.

By car: the only easy way to Sithonia

Three buses a day go to Neos Marmaras and Sarti, and the last one leaves Pylaia at 17:45. For anyone staying on Sithonia, or planning to see more than one beach, a car is the straightforward answer. The rental desks are in the Arrivals hall: Avis and Budget, Enterprise, Hertz and Thrifty, Sixt and the Greek firm Avance, with local companies meeting customers outside. Count on about an hour and a quarter to Kassandra and two to Sithonia, and more on a summer Saturday, when half of Thessaloniki drives to the beach.

Two limits are worth knowing before you book. Taking the car across the border into North Macedonia, Albania or Bulgaria needs the rental company's written permission and usually a fee, and some companies refuse it outright. And the car stops at Ouranoupoli: Mount Athos is a monastic state with no road in, reached only by boat, with entry limited to men holding a permit. Women can see the monasteries from the cruise boats, which keep about 500 metres offshore.

Porto Koufo, at the far end of Sithonia, about two and a quarter hours from the runway. The coves down here are the reason to hire a car. Photo: kallerna, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Into Thessaloniki: the 01X, the metro and the fixed fare

Bus 01X leaves from outside Arrivals every 20 to 25 minutes from 06:10 to 22:40 and runs through the centre to the railway station and the main intercity bus station. The ticket is €2, valid 70 minutes, from the machines in the terminal or the one on board, which takes contact and contactless cards. The cheap €0.60 city ticket is not valid on it, and the €1.80 fare still quoted on many sites is out of date. It takes about 45 minutes to Aristotelous Square. There is no stop called White Tower: get off at Sintrivani or Kamara and walk down to the sea. After 22:40 the 01N night bus follows the same route every half hour until 02:05, and then nothing leaves the airport until 05:30.

The metro does not reach the airport yet. The Kalamaria extension opened on 27 August 2026 and ends at Mikra, and a new bus, 03X, links the terminal to Mikra station in about 25 minutes, from 05:30 to 00:25. For Kalamaria and the eastern waterfront it is the quicker way in. An extension of the line to the terminal itself is at the study stage, with no date.

Taxis to the centre charge a fixed fare: €25 by day and €35 between midnight and 05:00. In September 2026 the transport ministry announced a rise to €28 and €38, which applies once it is published in the official gazette, so expect either figure for now. Uber works here only as a way of booking a licensed taxi, and FREENOW does the same.

The White Tower and the seafront, ten minutes on foot from the Sintrivani and Kamara stops of the 01X. Photo: George Zografidis, Pexels.

Flying on to the islands from SKG

Athens is the hub of the Greek domestic network, and most island trips connect there. But Thessaloniki has its own direct flights to a good list of islands, and for anyone already in the north they save the detour south.

• All year

  Heraklion and Chania on Crete, Rhodes, Lesvos (Mytilene), Chios, Samos and Lemnos, with Aegean, Sky Express or Olympic.

• Summer only

  Mykonos, Santorini, Paros and Naxos, plus Milos, Syros and Zakynthos, added by Aegean in 2026.

• Not direct

  Kefalonia, Corfu and most of the small Cyclades. Connect through Athens, or take the ferry.

Ryanair's domestic flights from here to Heraklion and Chania end in late October 2026 with the closure of its winter base, so for Crete in winter it is Aegean or Sky Express. On arrival, the pages on Heraklion airport and Rhodes airport cover the transfers at the other end. If your trip continues on the mainland further south, the flight you want is to Athens, the starting point for the road trip round the Peloponnese.

Who flies to SKG from the UK

Year round, easyJet from London Gatwick and Ryanair from London Stansted. From spring to autumn the list lengthens: easyJet from Bristol and Manchester, British Airways from Heathrow, Gatwick and London City, TUI from Birmingham, Gatwick and Manchester, and Jet2 from Birmingham, Bristol, East Midlands, Edinburgh, Leeds Bradford, Gatwick, Stansted, Manchester and Newcastle. Many of the Jet2 and TUI seats are sold with a Halkidiki package and its coach transfer, which settles the question of the road south.

Is Ryanair leaving Thessaloniki?

Not entirely. On 8 May 2026 Ryanair announced that it would close its three-aircraft base at Thessaloniki for winter 2026/27, blaming the charges set by Fraport Greece, which runs the airport. Twelve routes stop between 23 and 29 October, among them Berlin, Frankfurt Hahn, Stockholm, Venice Treviso and the domestic flights to Heraklion and Chania. Routes flown by aircraft based elsewhere continue, including London Stansted. Check your dates if you are booking a winter trip on one of the cut routes.

The airport itself

Thessaloniki International Airport Makedonia is one of the three busiest in Greece, with almost eight million passengers in 2025, and unlike the island airports it is busy all year. It sits at Mikra, in the Thermi municipality, about 13 km south-east of the centre. The main runway was extended by a kilometre into the Thermaic Gulf and has been in use at its full 3,440 metres since 2020, which is why the approach feels like a landing on the water.

Fraport Greece, which has run the airport since 2017, added a new building that opened in 2021 and joined it to the old terminal, so in practice there is a single terminal with one arrivals hall. Arrivals is where the bus stop (outside exit 4), the taxi rank and the car hire desks all are. Allow two hours before a flight within Schengen and nearer three for the UK in high summer, when the charters leave in waves and passport control is the slow point.

SKG is the code on your ticket, LGTS the one air traffic control uses, and Makedonia, or Macedonia, the official name. They are all the same airport, whatever the booking site calls it.