Eindhoven Airport, the short way into Brabant

The Netherlands has a second airport worth knowing about, and it sits on the doorstep of the country’s technology industry. A practical guide to EIN, its single terminal and the drives that follow.

Eindhoven Airport is the busiest airport in the Netherlands after Schiphol, and almost nobody outside the country has heard of it. It handles mostly short-haul European routes flown by low-cost airlines, which is why it rarely appears in a long-haul itinerary — and why, for anyone whose business is in the province of Noord-Brabant, it can quietly remove ninety minutes of motorway from each end of a trip. Our chauffeurs work both ends of that decision, so here is what the airport is actually like and what follows once you are outside it.

One terminal, and very little of it

EIN is a single building on the western edge of Eindhoven, at Meerhoven, hard against the A2 motorway and the Flight Forum business park next door. It shares its runway with Vliegbasis Eindhoven, the Dutch air force base that occupies the other side of the field — which is why you may see military transport aircraft parked while you taxi past.

Inside, the layout is about as simple as a commercial airport gets. Departures has a row of check-in desks, one security filter and a single shared gate area beyond it; there is no train to another pier and no chance of losing yourself. Arrivals is a short walk to a couple of baggage belts and then straight out through one exit onto the kerb. In practice you are outside a good deal sooner than at Schiphol, though when several flights land within minutes of each other the passport desks and the belts do feel their size.

• Do not plan a tight connection here: it is a point-to-point airport, not a hub, and the routes are seasonal in places.
• There is no railway station at the airport. A bus runs to Eindhoven Centraal, which takes a manageable twenty-odd minutes with hand luggage and rather longer with a suitcase and a laptop bag.
• The terminal kerb is right in front of the door, so a pre-booked car is a genuinely short walk rather than a hike to a garage.
• Everything about the building rewards travelling light. Bring a suitcase and the logic starts to point towards a car at the other end.

Where a chauffeur meets you

Because there is only one arrivals hall, the pickup is the least complicated part of an Eindhoven trip. The chauffeur is inside with a sign — your name, a company name, or nothing at all if you would rather not be announced in a small hall where everybody can see everybody. We take your flight number at booking and track the aircraft, so an early landing is met and a delayed one does not cost you the car. Bags are taken at the door. The price was fixed when you booked, taxes included, per car rather than per passenger.

Departures work the same way in reverse, with one Brabant-specific caveat: the A2 through Eindhoven carries an extraordinary amount of freight, and the ring road around the city can turn a fifteen-minute run into a half-hour one without warning. We leave earlier rather than driving faster, and the Eindhoven airport transfer page sets out how the run is quoted from each part of the city.

What is within reach, and how long it takes

Eindhoven is the centre of what the region calls Brainport — the cluster of technology and manufacturing companies spread across the city and the towns around it. Most of our guests landing at EIN are heading for one of these addresses rather than a hotel, and the drives are short.

• Eindhoven city centre, Eindhoven Centraal and the Vestdijk hotels: roughly a quarter of an hour, about ten kilometres across the city.
• De Run in Veldhoven, the ASML site: a few minutes further west, and one of the shortest airport runs we drive anywhere.
• High Tech Campus Eindhoven, on the southern ring: around twenty minutes, depending on which side of the A2 the traffic is stuck on.
• Strijp-S, the old Philips factory quarter now full of studios and restaurants: ten to fifteen minutes.
• Tilburg, west along the A58: roughly half an hour.
• ’s-Hertogenbosch — Den Bosch to everyone who lives there — north up the A2: about the same again.
• Amsterdam and Schiphol, if a plan changes: roughly an hour and a half of motorway, which is precisely the time EIN exists to save you.

The city itself is worth a little more than a taxi to a campus gate. The Eindhoven city pages go through the districts properly, from the Van Abbemuseum and the Evoluon to the Stratumseind and the design quarter that fills up whenever Dutch Design Week takes over the town.

EIN or Schiphol?

The calculation is almost entirely about where you are going once you land, not about the airports themselves.

1. If your destination is in Brabant — Eindhoven, Veldhoven, Helmond, Tilburg, Den Bosch — and a route exists from your city, EIN wins comfortably. You save the A2 twice, and that road is not a pleasant way to end a day of travel.
2. If you are flying intercontinental, or connecting onto another flight, Schiphol is the only sensible answer. EIN has no hub network and is not built for transfers.
3. If you are going to Amsterdam, use Schiphol. Flying into Eindhoven to reach the capital means adding an hour and a half of driving to save nothing.
4. If you are travelling as a group with equipment, weigh the terminal against the car. Seven passengers and seven bags fit in one Van Class vehicle from either airport, and one car is usually simpler than two flights.
5. If your schedule is genuinely tight, remember that Schiphol has far more departures per day to most European cities. A cheap flight that leaves once a day is not a saving if it strands you.

A last practical note

Brabant is the part of the Netherlands where distances start to feel American: everything is twenty minutes away, and almost none of it is walkable from a station. That is the real argument for arranging a car before you fly rather than after you land. Tell dispatch the whole itinerary — airport, site visit, hotel, dinner, airport again — and it becomes one quoted arrangement with one person driving it, whether you come in through the small airport by the motorway or the large one up the A2 from Amsterdam.

Questions, answered

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