Staying a night at Ercan international airport

score:4

Accepted answer

Ok I can answer my question, as I did travel to North Cyprus via Ercan this weekend and came back last night :-).

In the whole airport there are couple of benches, however they are not sleeping material, because of the following reasons:

  1. They are made of metals, and sleeping on them is obviously uncomfortable.

  2. These benches are in the arrival section of the airport, and because there are flights from very early morning (4:30 am to Istanbul) people come and go and therefore there are lots of noise involved.

  3. These benches are next to the shops, so for example last night on the way back to Istanbul I tried to sleep for couple of minutes as I arrived after midnight, and the shop keeper was blasting music at 2 am!

Best Solution

Best solution is to change your Istanbul to Ercan flight (~50 British Pound for economy class), as there are around 4 flights a day to Ercan, and you can spend the night in the Istanbul international airtport; and get the early flight (~ 7 am) to Ercan.

Upvote:2

The official page of the airport does not mention any hotel/sleeping facility. Moreover, the Sleepinginairports page for Ercan contains two reviews, one, dating 2003, mentioning uncomfortable metal, albeit armrest-free, seats on which it is indeed possible to sleep without lying down due to a small number of them:

even though all seats were metal ones, they had no armrest and sleep was fairly attainable. A slight lack of seats, specially if trying to get more than one to lie down

The second review, dating 2006, however points out that since the page name is wrong (Nicosia Airport points to an abandoned airfield), the afore-mentioned review could refer to either Larnaca, Paphos, or Ercan:

Nicosia Airport lies in the buffer zone between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot areas of Cyprus. It is not operational and has not been in use since 1974. Any reviw referring to an operating airport in Cyprus probably refers to Larnaca, but might also be about Paphos or Ercan. Beware!

Bottom line is I could not find any information regarding sleeping at Ercan Airport specifically. So either you try it out, and come back to tell us the story, or you might want to consider a bus into Nicosia and a hotel there. To this purpose, the Ercan airport website has links to hotels in Nicosia.

Upvote:2

According to Booking.com, the closest hotel to Ercan airport is 8.5 km away, but that's in Nicosia across the border, which is probably quite inconvenient.

The closest hotels in Northern Cyprus are located in Kyrenia, which is 40 km by car. A one-way transfer by taxi would cost $40 and it doesn't appear that there is any public transportation available.

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