Athens International Airport (ATH)

Athens International sits east of the city, and the answer to how long it takes to reach your bed depends less on distance than on which direction you are going. The coastal suburbs south of the city — Glyfada, Voula, Vouliagmeni — are about half an hour by car, which makes them closer to the airport than central Athens is. That single fact reshapes a lot of itineraries, because the default assumption is that the city is the near thing and the coast is the excursion, and for arrivals it is the other way around.

Build extra time into your first passage through passport control. The EU's Entry/Exit System takes fingerprints and a photograph on a traveler's first entry, and that enrollment happens in the queue. It is once rather than every time, but it lands on the morning you have just come off an overnight flight, which is the morning you have least patience for it.

The arithmetic of the first day is worth doing before you book. A morning arrival puts you landside well before any hotel will have a room ready, since check-in on this coast is commonly mid-afternoon. That gap is not a problem so long as you plan for it — leave the bags at the desk and start the trip at a beach or a long lunch rather than sitting in a lobby waiting for a key.

Picking up a rental car here works well and is the usual move for anything beyond the Riviera, because it puts you on the road without a city-center collection. Going the other way on the last morning, an early drop at the airport is straightforward and much less fraught than returning a car downtown with a flight to catch.

If you are connecting onward to an island rather than staying, the domestic network out of Athens is what makes the islands reachable without a ferry day — a hop to somewhere like Kefalonia runs about an hour in the air.