Kalkan → Dalaman Airport Transfer

Kalkan to Dalaman Airport private transfer

A departure is a different piece of planning from an arrival: there is a desk with a fixed hour behind it and everything else is worked backwards. Dalaman is the airport the Kalkan coast flies out of, so this booking is the last morning of the villa week — bins out, keys on the table, four cases and a family who would rather not be standing at a bus stop with them. Charter flights from this coast leave either very early or very late, which puts the drive before breakfast or after dinner. Owners closing a house for the winter take the same leg in October, with the shutters done and the fridge empty.

The first eighty kilometres are the Fethiye road, and the journey only changes character beyond the town. It carries on past Göcek, where a tunnel driven under the ridge has taken the old mountain pass out of the trip altogether, and comes down onto the Dalaman plain: cotton, citrus, irrigation channels, flat all the way to the airport fence. Dalaman has a single terminal standing in farmland and nothing of Antalya's scale about it, and the approach is so short that the last kilometre is already the car park. Allow a hundred minutes for the 120 km, and a little more on a changeover Saturday in August.

• Dalaman's terminal is small, which cuts both ways: the check-in queue forms and clears quickly, but there is little to do once you are through, so arriving hours early buys less comfort here than at a big airport.
• Give the flight number rather than the hour, and the villa name rather than the street — one says when a car should be waiting where the lane meets the road, the other says which lane.
• A departure before daylight puts the bends before Fethiye in the dark, facing lorry headlights, so settle who sits in front before anyone gets in.
• If the house has to be left clean and empty, the loading is part of the timetable: cases carried down a stepped lane take longer than cases rolled through a hotel lobby.