Hi All!
I have a very early Tuesday morning Vueling flight departing at 6:15am from BCN. We are staying in El Born. Googlemaps says it's roughly 15km via car. Is it easy to find a taxi that early? Any suggestions? I'm thinking that we'd need to leave around 4am to get there in time?
There are taxis 24/7... simply walk to the front of Estació de França, there's a taxi rank there -incidentally, in front of the station there's a cafe that's open also all night long and it's one of the classic meeting points for taxi drivers in the night shift. You could also just wait at any major street and soon enough an available taxi will pass by (those with the green pilot on the roof on -simply hail them). There are 11000 taxis in the city -not sure how many doing the night shift, but a lot of them, for comparison, NY city has 4 times the population of Barcelona and just 13000 taxis. Ah yes, all taxis in the city are painted the same: yellow and black.
As per how early... I would be cautious and be there extra-early because these past two weeks the airport has been (still is!) in a "rough patch" with the new EU border checks and the boycott of the Spanish government to this airport by purposely not increasing the Spanish Police staff -the only ones authorised to do the checks. There have been very long queues with the Police booths severely understaffed so the normal 1h for European flights, 2h for overseas flights recommendation needs to be greatly increased to make sure you don't loose your flight should you get stuck in one of those queues... should you stumble into one. The driving from the area of El Born to the airport at those hours shouldn't take more than 30' -give or take.
PS. Long story short, it has to do with political tensions between the Spanish and the Catalan governments ahead of the independence referendum to be celebrated later in the year. If particularly interested in the reasons of this "episode" at the airport, just take a look at the press these days (example here, use Google Translate)
I flew from BCN back to the US last August, and I was in line at the United counter for almost an hour. I was glad I had shown up 3 hours early, because I ended up needing almost all of that time, since I was selected for some sort of extra security scrutiny.
Thank you both for your insight and experience, appreciate it!
Thank you for posting this - can you provide an update on how it turned out?
Our family is flying out of Barcelona via British Airways on a Tuesday morning at 10:30. Google maps says it is about a 20 minutes drive but that doesn't account for traffic! I would love to know how far in advance you got to the airport for your flight!
Ahhh Ann... you must have a "suspicious" look, LOL! :))
