Flying into Corfu with small children

Corfu Airport is small, close to town, and awkward in exactly one way that matters with children: almost every flight from northern Europe lands in the evening, and a lot of them land late.

Everything below follows from that.

The arrivals hall, honestly

CFU has one terminal and one baggage hall. It was rebuilt and it is much better than it was, and it is still a building sized for a smaller island than the one arriving in August.

What that means in practice on a summer evening:

• Two or three wide-body arrivals inside forty minutes fill passport control and the baggage belts at once.
• Between landing and standing outside with your bags, forty-five minutes is normal and an hour is not unusual.
• The car hire desks are the longest queue in the building, and they are slowest exactly when everybody else is also tired.

None of this is a complaint about the airport. It is the arithmetic you plan a small child's evening around.

Timing, and the thing to accept early

A 22:40 landing means about 23:30 outside the terminal and, for most of the resorts, somewhere between midnight and one in the morning at your door.

You cannot fix that. What you can do is stop pretending the first evening exists. Feed everybody on the plane, accept that the first night is a write-off, and do not book anything for the following morning. Parents who plan the first full day as a rest day have a better week than parents who plan a beach at nine.

The seat, which is the part people get wrong

Greek law requires an appropriate child restraint, and the honest problem is not the law, it is fit. A booster for a six-year-old is easy. A proper seat for a nine-month-old is not something you want to discover is unavailable at midnight.

Three things worth knowing:

• A taxi from the rank will very rarely have a child seat. This is the single most common reason families end up holding a baby on a lap in a car, which is exactly what nobody wants to do after a four-hour flight.
• Airline-carried seats work, and they cost you time. Your own seat is the best-fitting one there is; it also arrives on the oversized belt, which is not the belt your suitcases arrive on.
• A booked car can have the right seat in it before it leaves the depot, but only if the ages are on the booking. "We have a toddler" is not enough information to choose between three seat types. Give the age in months for anyone under three.

We fit child and booster seats at no charge on every transfer, and the reason we ask for ages at booking rather than at pick-up is that a seat cannot be conjured at the kerb.

Luggage, which is the other part

A family of four with a fortnight's luggage, a travel cot and a buggy does not fit in a saloon car. This is not upselling, it is geometry, and it is the most common cause of a two-vehicle problem at midnight.

The fleet page lists bag capacity next to seat count for that reason, and the transfer planner picks the smallest vehicle that actually fits the party and the bags rather than the cheapest one, and disables anything undersized rather than letting you book it and find out.

If the buggy is a full-size pram rather than a fold-flat, say so. It is the single item most likely to change which vehicle we send.

What a booked transfer actually changes

Not comfort, particularly. Three things:

It is waiting when you are late. We track the flight, so a delayed arrival is our problem before it is yours. Nobody re-books, nobody calls anyone, the fare does not change.

It has the seats already in it. Fitted before the vehicle leaves, checked by the driver, and the right size because you told us the ages.

It ends at your door. Or as near to it as the road allows, and where it cannot, the driver walks the bags in with you. For the Old Town, that matters more than people expect: the lanes inside the Spianada are pedestrian and stepped, and a car cannot reach a great many of the addresses there.

Going home, which is easier to get wrong

Departures at CFU are busier than arrivals feel, because the same evening wave leaves in the morning.

Allow the full two hours for a summer departure and add the drive. For most east-coast resorts we collect two hours before the flight; for Kavos, Sidari or the far north it is three, because the drive is genuinely long and the last twelve kilometres of the north-coast road are slow in August.

The one thing worth doing at home before you leave: check whether your seat is coming back with you or was hired. Families lose the seat on the way out more often than any other item.

And one thing that has nothing to do with logistics

The flight in from the north crosses the lagoon and lands almost over the water, and on a clear evening you can see Vlacherna and Mouse Island out of the left-hand windows about a minute before touchdown.

Tell the children to look. It is the best thing that happens all day, and it costs nothing.