Routes and transfers

Asunción airport: arriving, leaving and getting into the city

Silvio Pettirossi International Airport sits in Luque, about 15 km from downtown Asunción, and the drive to your hotel takes 25 to 40 minutes depending on the hour. Here is everything that happens between the aircraft door and the hotel door.

The short answer

If you landed here searching for Asuncion airport, you probably want three things: where it is, how long the drive into the city takes, and how to get out of the terminal without losing half an hour. All three are below, with the numbers from our own operation. The rest of the post covers the detail.

What happens between the plane and the hotel

Silvio Pettirossi is a small airport, and that works in the passenger’s favour. There are no terminals a mile apart, no internal train, no building to change. You get off the aircraft, walk a few minutes, clear immigration, wait for your bag and you are in the arrivals hall. On an uneventful flight, all of that takes 25 to 45 minutes from the moment the door opens.

Then comes the part almost nobody plans: the 15 km into the city. That is the part that decides whether you reach the hotel with time to spare or turn up late for the first meeting. The drive itself is short and the road is good, but traffic in metropolitan Asunción at six in the morning has nothing in common with seven in the evening, and the gap between the two is comfortably over twenty minutes.

The third surprise is walking out of the terminal. The airport is in Luque, not in Asunción, and the arrivals hall is small: when two flights land together, the kerb outside fills up. If you have nothing booked, that kerb is where you negotiate, and it is not the best place to negotiate anything with four suitcases and no sleep.

This post covers all three parts with concrete numbers: the terminal and what is inside it, the real drive times by hour, how the meeting with the driver works, and what each route out of the airport costs. The airport facts come from official and public sources, cited with the date we checked them. The times, the prices and the meeting point are ours, from our own operation.

How long the drive really takes, by landing time

Times from our own operation, from the arrivals hall to a hotel in central Asunción, measured on real transfers. These are not map averages: they include the minutes spent loading luggage and leaving the airport grounds.

Two things break any estimate: rain and long weekends. In heavy rain, add ten to twenty minutes to any window. On long weekends, leaving Asunción is slow on Friday afternoon and coming back in is slow on Sunday night, and both affect the airport approaches.

That is why our airport transfers in Asunción are priced per vehicle and not per minute: the USD 49 is the same whether the drive takes 22 minutes at three in the morning or 52 minutes on a Thursday at six in the evening. We carry the traffic risk, which is the only honest way to sell a transfer in a city that has a rush hour.

From the aircraft door to the car seat, step by step

This is what an international arrival with a booked transfer actually does. Six steps, none of them complicated, but knowing the order saves nerves on a first trip.

1. 1
   

   You get off and walk to immigration

   The terminal has two international concourses, the south one with gates 1 to 4 and the north one with gates 5 and 6. From any of the six it is a few minutes on foot to the control. There is no internal transport because none is needed.

2. 2
   

   You clear immigration

   Passport or ID depending on your nationality. DINAC has announced five electronic e-gates for 2026, aimed precisely at shortening this queue. If your flight lands alongside another international arrival, this is the step that stretches.

3. 3
   

   You collect your luggage

   The belt is metres from immigration. With a single flight on the ground, bags usually come out fast. If you are travelling with extra luggage or something bulky like a child seat, it is better to have flagged it when booking.

4. 4
   

   Customs, then out into the hall

   Customs check and that is it: you walk out into the arrivals hall. That hall is the only possible meeting point, because nobody who is not flying can get into the baggage area.

5. 5
   

   You look for the board with your name

   Our driver is standing right there with a printed board showing the passenger’s name. He does not call you and does not ask you to come out to the kerb: the meeting happens inside, and the courtesy wait is 30 minutes from touchdown.

6. 6
   

   Into the vehicle and onto the road

   The driver takes the luggage, the car is parked on airport grounds, and the 15 km start from there. No tolls and no border on the way. Payment is already done: on airport transfers we charge 100% in advance, by payment link, card, bank transfer, digital wallet or crypto.

On a domestic flight step 2 disappears and the whole circuit gets noticeably shorter. And if you are arriving on a connection, give us the final flight number rather than the first leg: the final leg is the one we track.

What never changes is the order. Immigration first, then the bag, then customs, and the driver always on the far side. Nobody can come in to collect you earlier, us included, and if someone approaches you offering transport before customs, that person is not part of the airport operation.

The airport in figures, with the source for each one

These numbers are not ours. They come from DINAC, the authority that runs the airport, from the Paraguayan press that covered the building works, and from the airport’s public record. Checked on 30 September 2026.

One figure comes in two versions and we would rather say so: the 2025 passenger total appears as 1,327,342 in the DINAC information carried by the Paraguayan press and as 1,323,613 in the airport’s public record. The gap is tiny and changes nothing for a traveller, but it shows that even official numbers are worth checking twice.

The figure that matters most to the passenger experience is the expansion. An airport moving 1.3 million people through the old building felt every large international arrival. With capacity tripled, the bottleneck moved from the building to the immigration queue, which is exactly why the e-gates are the project you will actually notice on the clock.

What the expansion does not change is the distance. The 15 km into the city will still be 15 km, and six in the evening will still be six in the evening.

Getting out of the airport: what is actually at the door

This covers only what exists at the terminal and how each option behaves the moment you land. The full comparison of taxis, apps, car hire and private transfers, with the criteria for each scenario, is in the dedicated post.

• A private transfer booked before you fly. That is what we do: a driver waiting in the hall with a name board, a fixed price per vehicle, flight-number tracking and 30 minutes of courtesy waiting. The real advantage is not the car, it is that the decision was made before the plane landed.
• The airport taxi rank. It exists and it works. There is no published price in advance, so the fare is agreed before you get in, and many drivers still take cash only. If this is your first time in Paraguay and you have no guaraníes on you, factor that in.
• Ride-hailing apps. They operate across the metro area. The weak point is not the price, it is predictability on arrival: you depend on signal, on roaming and on a car being available at that hour, and at three in the morning those three things together are not a plan.
• Car hire at the terminal. It makes sense if the plan is to drive around the country for several days. For the airport-to-hotel leg alone it is counter paperwork, a security deposit, and then finding parking downtown.
• Public transport. The cheapest option and the one we least recommend for a first arrival, with luggage and no knowledge of the city. With a big suitcase, at night, simply no.
• Someone picking you up. It works fine, the hall is small and there is no way to get lost. The only caveat is parking: the arrivals area is not a place to sit for half an hour with the engine running.

If you want the case-by-case comparison, including the scenarios where the cheapest option is the right one, it is in getting around Asunción: taxi, Uber or transfer. That post also says when hiring us is the wrong call, which is half of the useful information.

Flights that land in the middle of the night

A good share of the flights reaching Asunción from Europe and from the northern hubs of the continent land in the small hours. That is the window when the airport is quietest, the road is empty and the drive into the city is the fastest of the day, 20 to 25 minutes. It is also the window where everything you did not book turns into a problem.

At that hour the arrivals hall empties fast, not every desk in the terminal is open, exchange bureaux keep office hours and your hotel may not have a full reception on duty. If your SIM also fails to pick up a signal, you are left without an app, without local cash and without anyone to ask, all at once.

The rule is simple and holds for any airport in the world, but it weighs more here because the city is small and there is no endless queue of cars outside: a transfer for a night arrival is booked before you fly. We operate 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and for the small hours an advance booking is not a sales pitch, it is the only way a driver is assigned to your flight at all.

If your flight is delayed, the driver stays. We track the flight number you give us when booking, so if you land two hours late the service moves with the flight instead of being lost. That works off the flight number, not off whatever time you tell us, which is why we always ask for it and why on a connection we need the final leg.

The same logic applies in reverse to pre-dawn departures. A 5 am flight means leaving the hotel around 2, and that is precisely the hour when you do not want to be looking for a ride. You book it the day before and you sleep.

What a transfer out of the airport costs

Prices from our August 2026 rate sheet, in US dollars, per vehicle and not per passenger, with fuel, tolls and driver included. The sedan takes 1 to 3 passengers; for a Hyundai H1 minivan up to 7 or a Mercedes Sprinter for 8 to 14 we quote separately.

The long-distance figures are the Asunción-origin rates; if the pickup is the airport we confirm them when quoting, because the airport sits on the Luque side and on some routes that works in your favour. The Formosa route runs sedan only: the border permits do not cover our larger vehicles. One suitcase per passenger included, extra suitcase USD 5, 30 minutes of courtesy waiting and USD 10 per hour after that. We quote in US dollars and also accept guaraníes, Brazilian reais and Argentine pesos.

There is one case worth doing the arithmetic on: the passenger who flies into Asunción when the real destination is Ciudad del Este, Foz do Iguaçu or Puerto Iguazú. There the airport is not the end of the journey but kilometre zero of a 327 to 350 km drive, and the airport transfer and the long-distance leg are booked as a single service. The detail of each route is in private transfers in Asunción, with all 237 priced destinations.

When hiring us makes sense, and when it does not

We are private transport at a fixed price. It is not the best option for everyone, and saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise.

Departure day: how early to be at the airport

Half the airport questions that reach our WhatsApp are not about arriving, they are about leaving. And the question is always the same: what time are you picking me up.

Our operating rule is to schedule the pickup so that you are at the check-in desk three hours before an international flight and two hours before a domestic one. On top of that we add the drive time for the relevant window, with the margin in the table above. An 8 am international departure means a pickup around 04:30, because the road is clear at that hour; the same flight at 20:00 needs a proportionally larger cushion, because it crosses the evening peak.

The minimum check-in time is not ours to set: each airline sets it, and it can change by season, by destination and by fare type. If your airline asks for something different, send us that instruction and we schedule to that number. You will never see a specific flight schedule or a named airline’s check-in time in this post, because that is exactly the kind of data that changes without notice.

One detail that saves money on the way out: the return booked together is USD 84 instead of two separate USD 49 services. If you know your departure date when you book the arrival, close both ends at once.

And the least glamorous advice of all: if your flight leaves on a Friday afternoon or a Sunday night, leave earlier than common sense suggests. The approaches to the metro area in those two windows are the worst of the week, and a missed flight costs many times more than any transfer.

Frequently asked questions

The questions people actually send us on WhatsApp before landing in Asunción.

The airport is the easy part. The 15 km are what you plan

Silvio Pettirossi is small, well signposted and, since 2025, has three times the capacity it used to. Clearing the terminal is not the problem. The problem is the half hour that follows, which depends on when you land and on what you sorted out before boarding. Send us the flight number, the date and how many of you there are, and that half hour is settled with a fixed price and a driver holding your name on a board.

The airport facts (codes, runway, elevation, concourses and gates, airlines, terminal services, 2025 passenger figures, the 2,245 sq m expansion and the e-gates planned for 2026) come from DINAC, from the Paraguayan press that covered the works and from the airport’s public record, all checked on 30 September 2026. They are not our data and can change without notice: infrastructure, controls and airlines all shift by season. The drive times, the meeting point, the courtesy wait and the prices are ours, from our August 2026 rate sheet, per vehicle and in US dollars, with fuel, tolls and driver included. We do not publish flight schedules or third-party fares.