Airport
Palma de Mallorca Airport (PMI)
Son Sant Joan, as the island calls it, is one of the most seasonal large airports in Europe: a single enormous terminal sized for the height of summer, which spends the winter feeling several sizes too big. Almost nobody connects here. People arrive in Palma or head straight out to a cove, a villa or a mountain village, and the building exists to move them on. The only decision that really matters is how you leave it.
Updated 2026-09-22
- CodesPMI · LEPA
- Passengers per year (2024)33,298,164
- Elevation8 m
- ServesPalma de Mallorca
- Official websiteaena.es
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One terminal, four modules, long walks
Everything runs from a single building, with a check-in hall stretched along its length and four boarding modules lettered A to D branching off it. They are assigned by flight type rather than by airline: one takes the non-Schengen traffic, chiefly British and Irish, another the small aircraft that hop to Ibiza and Menorca, and the two largest carry the European flights that make up the bulk of a summer day. Assignments shift with the season.
Size is the practical fact here. The far modules are a long walk from security, and in the peak weeks that walk comes after a queue, so the boarding pass is worth reading the moment it appears. Arrivals go the other way down one long channel to the baggage hall and out into a single concourse, where every bus, taxi and transfer driver on the island seems to be standing at once.
Into Palma, and straight out to the coast
An airport bus runs from outside arrivals to Plaça d'Espanya in the middle of Palma, which is where the island's own trains and metro start, and a second line works the other way along the Platja de Palma hotel strip. Both are cheap, frequent in season and untroubled by suitcases. No railway reaches the airport itself, so anyone bound for Sóller or Inca by train begins with that bus.
Seasonal express coaches leave the same concourse for the main resort regions — the bays of the north around Alcúdia, the southwest, the eastern coast — and skip the city entirely, which is exactly what most arriving passengers want. Taxis wait at a marked rank a few steps along, metered, with the airport surcharge printed on the tariff card rather than argued over, and pre-booked transfer drivers hold their signs in the same hall.
Why so many people walk out with car keys
A larger share of arrivals here leaves in a hired car than at almost any comparable Spanish airport, and the operation is built to match: desks in the arrivals hall, the fleet in the multi-storey garage opposite the terminal, and return lanes signposted on the approach road. Demand outruns supply in high summer, when the late booker pays for the privilege, so this is one hire to arrange with the flight rather than after it.
The car earns its keep because the island's best parts are the ones the buses serve slowly or not at all — the Serra de Tramuntana corniche, the limestone coves of the east, the villages behind the coast. Getting to the island runs on the same logic in reverse: for the Balearics a flight beats the crossing, which is where the mainland's rail-first habit stops at the water.
The border, the peak and the two airports in one
Arrivals from inside the Schengen area face no passport check and are at the carousel as fast as their bags. British, Irish and other non-Schengen passengers meet the external border before anything else, and in the peak months that hall is the airport's pinch point; the automated gates swallow the passports they accept quickly, and the rest of the queue waits for an officer. Whatever paperwork your own passport asks for is decided long before the gate, in Spain's entry rules.
Departures bunch rather than spread. The holiday waves push most of the day's flights into the morning and the late afternoon, and the security hall shows it, while the same building out of season handles a fraction of the traffic with fewer modules in use and a much shorter route map. Summer and winter are effectively two different airports wearing one roof.
Practical: waiting, bags, islands and money
Airside there is seating, food and shopping on a generous scale but not much else, and a delayed evening flight at the height of the season is a crowded thing to sit through. Bag storage sits on the public side of the building, which solves the classic Mallorca last day, when the room has to be vacated at noon and the flight does not leave until dark.
Hops to Ibiza and Menorca leave from the regional module and run like buses with wings, which makes a two-island trip far easier to build than it looks from the mainland. An eSIM arranged at home is what makes the hire-car app and the villa directions work in the car park. Cards are taken everywhere on the island, with one exception: the small village bar behind the coast, where a note or two of local cash still smooths the way.