Kefalonia Airport (EFL)

Kefalonia's airport sits near Svoronata on the south of the island, and its size is the thing to plan around. It handles domestic flights from Athens year-round and seasonal international arrivals in summer, which means July is when it is busiest and least like the quiet regional airport it is the rest of the year.

The flight from Athens is about an hour. That makes the island a genuinely easy add-on to a mainland trip rather than a separate expedition, and it is a considerably better use of a day than the alternative overland-and-ferry route.

The airport's position is more useful than it first appears. The south-coast beaches and the hotels along that stretch are only a few minutes away, so a stay based at that end of the island starts within a quarter of an hour of the aircraft door. If you have arrived on an afternoon flight, that is the difference between a first evening on a beach and a first evening spent driving.

Sort the car before you arrive rather than at the terminal, and sort it well before July. This is the single logistical decision on Kefalonia with no recovery path: automatics are a minority of the island fleet, they are gone weeks ahead in high summer, and there is no solving it at the desk on the day. Alongside the airport counters there are local firms that will deliver a car to the terminal at no extra charge, which is worth knowing both because it widens the pool of available automatics and because it takes the arrival queue out of the process entirely.

Coming back the other way, treat it as the small airport it is. A terminal built around year-round domestic traffic is absorbing summer international departures on top of that, so the standing advice to allow extra time is doing more work here than the airport's size would suggest.