Konyaalti to Antalya Airport Transfer

Konyaalti sits at the western end of Antalya with the Beydaglari behind it, and there is about 22 km of city between the pebble shore and the runway. The drive takes 35 to 46 minutes. Almost none of that is open road: the distance is modest and the variable is what the centre happens to be doing when you pass through it.

From the strip the route turns inland off the beach boulevard, climbs away from the shore and joins the main axis running through the middle of Antalya, skirting the edge of the old town before picking up the D400 eastbound for the final stretch to the terminal roads. The junctions in the centre are where minutes are won or lost; that last section on the D400 behaves the same way in almost any condition.

The two slow windows belong to the city rather than the airport. Weekday mornings from about 07:30 to 09:30 pull commuters inward from the west, which is precisely your direction of travel. Late afternoons from about 16:00 to 19:00 reverse it, and through July and August both windows run longer and heavier. A pickup before seven crosses an empty town and arrives at the short end of the range.

Send us the departure time and we work the pickup backwards from it against the day you are actually travelling. A Tuesday in November and a Saturday in August are not the same 22 km.

The beach boulevard is no place to stand a car in summer, and several of the larger hotels along it have a forecourt that fills with day-trip coaches by mid-morning. Where a property has its own entrance the driver comes in and waits at the door. Where it does not, we fix a spot in advance - usually the corner of your street and the boulevard - and put it in writing the day before rather than working it out over the phone at five in the morning.

A good number of guests here are in apartments and small apart-hotels rather than gated resorts, and that changes the pickup more than the postcode does. There may be nobody on the desk overnight, one lift serving the whole building, and a flight of steps down to the street. Tell us the floor and the number of cases and we send a driver who can park close enough to carry them; he rings the number on your booking a few minutes out rather than pressing a doorbell at four.

Arriving, you walk out of a terminal where cars are already queued and waiting for someone. Leaving Konyaalti, the queue runs the other way: you are one address among hundreds spread along a seven-kilometre strip, and at four or five in the morning the ranks near the beach are empty. Asking reception to call something works well enough in season and is far less certain in March or November, when a good part of the strip is shut.

The fare is the second difference. A metered run across the middle of Antalya is priced by how long the centre takes on that particular morning, which is the one thing nobody can quote you the night before. A booked transfer settles the number before you leave the room, and you hand it to the driver in cash at the terminal - no card, no deposit held anywhere.

Then there is the practical question of which car turns up. Something called at short notice is whatever happens to be nearest, and that is often a standard car whose boot will not take four large cases plus a pushchair. Booking sizes the vehicle against the load you described, and the load is agreed while you still have time to correct it.

If the inbound leg is still ahead of you, the same road runs the other way as the Antalya Airport to Konyaalti transfer. Booking the pair together is usually simpler than arranging the departure on its own halfway through the holiday: ask for the return when you book the arrival and the driver's details for your last morning are settled while you are still unpacking.