Heraklion Airport → Agios Nikolaos & Elounda

How it works

You book before you travel, give your flight number, and the price is fixed for the whole car rather than per person. On the licensed Crete operator's published list we checked, Agios Nikolaos is €78 one way over 65 km in a stated 60 minutes, and Elounda €84 over 75 km, also about an hour. Both include the drive right to the hotel door, which matters in Elounda where a good many hotels sit on their own private stretch of shoreline some way from the village.

Good to know

• •Ask your hotel first. Elounda has a higher concentration of five-star resorts than anywhere else in Crete, and a great many of them include or arrange the airport transfer. Paying twice for the same ride is the most common mistake on this route.
• •Split four ways, €84 to Elounda is €21 each. The three-bus route costs roughly €12 a head and takes two and a half to three hours. For a group the car is close to the same money and saves most of an afternoon.
• •Say up front if you need child seats. Greek law requires them and supply is not guaranteed on the day.

How it works

The official rank sits just outside the arrivals terminal and licensed cars queue there around the clock. This is an hour-long intercity run rather than a short hop, so agree the total in euro before the bags go in, using the published fixed fares as your reference. Expect a wait of around ten minutes at the rank, longer in high season.

Good to know

• •Carry cash. Card machines in Crete taxis exist but are not reliable, and this is not a fare you want to be arguing about at the end.
• •Elounda is about ten kilometres beyond Agios Nikolaos, so the fare should be higher. If a driver quotes the same for both, check which one they have understood.
• •Have the hotel name and address written down. Elounda hotels are strung along the coast road and several share very similar names.

How it works

There is no direct bus from the airport. For Agios Nikolaos it is two legs: a blue urban KTEL bus into Heraklion, about €2 and roughly 20 minutes, then a KTEL Heraklio-Lasithi coach east from Station A on the port avenue. Published fare lists put that second leg at about €7.70, with roughly twenty departures a day between six in the morning and half past ten at night, and a journey of about an hour and a half. For Elounda you then need a third bus, a short local hop of about fifteen to twenty minutes from Agios Nikolaos, running roughly hourly and costing about €2.

Good to know

• •The last Agios Nikolaos to Elounda bus goes at about 22:00. If your flight lands in the evening and Elounda is your destination, the bus route is effectively closed to you, whatever the timetable for the earlier legs says.
• •Tell the driver on the Heraklion coach that you are continuing to Elounda. They will tell you where to get off in Agios Nikolaos for the connection, which is not obvious from the road.
• •Published totals for this journey vary wildly online, from €7 to €26 for the same trip, sometimes on the same page. Our figures come from operator and published fare lists rather than transfer-company marketing pages.

How it works

You collect at the airport and drive east on the national road, about an hour to either town. Of all the Crete routes we have written up, this is the one where a car earns its keep most clearly: the interior of Lasithi, the mountain villages above Elounda and the road east towards Sitia are barely served by public transport, and the difference between having a car and not having one is the difference between seeing that country and not.

Good to know

• •We are not quoting a daily rate, because an honest one does not exist: it swings with season, category and how far ahead you book. Price it for your own dates.
• •If you are staying in Elounda and plan to eat in Agios Nikolaos more than a couple of times, price a week of taxis against a week of hire before deciding. It is closer than people expect.