Perugia San Francesco d’Assisi (PEG) Airport Guide 2026 — The Assisi Airport, 800 Years On

Last verified: September 2026.

🏢 1. A Gae Aulenti Terminal, Fifteen Summer Routes and Five in Winter

Umbria’s airport is one of very few in Europe worth describing architecturally. The terminal is the work of Gae Aulenti, and the airport’s own description is unusually clear about the intent: rather than the high-tech look of a contemporary airport, this one aims to be “a recognisable architecture integrated into the Umbrian landscape”. What that means in practice is a 4,700 m² terminal built as eight square-plan pavilions in red-painted reinforced concrete, with green copper pitched roofs and large windows looking towards Assisi, and car parks planted with olive trees to shade the cars. It was rebuilt and expanded for the 150th anniversary of Italian unification.

Inside, the layout is a central shopping gallery with shops down both sides, the airport authorities’ offices behind them, arrivals and departures halls airside, and waiting rooms, a cafeteria, a conference room and an exhibition hall landside. There is a flight information point and ticket office, an ATM, a bar–newsagent–tobacconist, free Wi-Fi, and the car hire desks in the arrivals area.

The single most important operational fact is the clock: the airport is open 06:00 to 22:00 every day, and the car parks run the same hours. Nothing lands here at one in the morning and nothing leaves at half past five. If you are used to squeezing an extra day out of a 06:20 Ryanair departure, Perugia will not sell you one.

The route map, and what happens to it in winter

The airport publishes its own destinations map, and the seasonal difference is the fact that most guides bury.

Summer 2026 — 29 March to 24 October, fifteen destinations:

• Ryanair (10) — Cagliari, Catania, Palermo, Brindisi, Barcelona El Prat, Brussels Charleroi, Bucharest, Kraków, London Stansted, Malta
• Aeroitalia (2) — Lamezia Terme, Olbia
• British Airways (1) — London Heathrow
• Wizz Air (1) — Tirana
• Transavia (1) — Rotterdam

Winter, on the airport’s published list, is five: Cagliari, Catania, Palermo and London Stansted with Ryanair, and Tirana with Wizz Air. That list is the 2025-26 winter map, from 26 October to 28 March; the airport had not published its 2026-27 equivalent when this guide was written, so treat five as the shape and check the current map before you book anything for November onwards.

Read that properly and two things follow. First, British Airways to Heathrow is the outlier here — a full-service carrier with real onward connections at a 620,000-passenger airport — and it is a summer route. If you need Heathrow in February, Perugia will not give it to you. Second, more than half of the summer network is domestic Italian leisure flying to Sicily, Sardinia, Puglia and Calabria; the international side is five cities, and four of those are low-cost.

Traffic itself is going the right way. SASE describes the airport as one of Italy’s fastest-growing, and the numbers back it: 620,420 passengers in 2025, up 16.1%, after 534,210 in 2024, and 376,312 in the first seven months of 2026, up 5.3% on the association’s running total. The airport says it is upgrading infrastructure to keep pace.

Because most of the network is low-cost, the cabin bag decides the real fare more often than the headline does. Price it with our baggage fee checker, read the detail in the Ryanair baggage allowance guide, the Wizz Air baggage allowance guide or — for the Heathrow route, which plays by different rules — the British Airways baggage allowance guide, and then run the comparison with our flight price checker.

🛂 2. Schengen, the Euro, and a Border Most Passengers Never Cross

Italy is in the Schengen area and Italy uses the euro. They are two separate memberships and Italy holds both, which means an arrival from Barcelona, Charleroi, Kraków, Bucharest or Rotterdam walks off the aircraft and out of the door with no passport control and no money to change.

The passengers who do meet a border here are the British ones — London Stansted on Ryanair and London Heathrow on British Airways — plus anyone arriving on the Tirana route who is not an EU or Schengen national.

For them, the EU Entry/Exit System (EES) is now the rule. The European Commission states that EES became fully operational on 10 April 2026, ending a progressive roll-out that started in October 2025. It replaces the passport stamp with a digital record: non-EU nationals travelling for a short stay — 90 days in any 180 — have their facial image, fingerprints and travel-document data captured on the first crossing, then a faster biometric check on later crossings while that record stands.

At a terminal this size, that has a practical edge. Perugia’s whole selling point is that check-in, security and boarding are faster than at a large airport, and they are — but the passport desks are sized for a small airport too. On a first EES entry, allow more time than the building’s size suggests, particularly if a Stansted and a Heathrow arrival land close together. On departure to a non-Schengen destination, the exit check is now an EES transaction as well.

ETIAS is not in operation. The Commission’s Smart Borders page states that ETIAS is currently not running and that no applications for travel authorisations are being collected, with the start date to be announced several months in advance. The fee is set at €20; under-18s, over-70s and qualifying family members of EU citizens are exempt from the fee but will still need an authorisation once it starts. Nobody can sell you a valid Italian ETIAS today.

Money is simple: euros, cards everywhere in Perugia and Assisi, an ATM in the terminal. Carry a little cash for the smaller religious houses, mountain hermitages and hilltown bars, which are not all card-friendly.

🚌 3. The €5 Airlink, the €35 Taxi, and Why Both End at a Station

There is no railway station at the airport, so every arrival is a road leg. Fortunately Umbria has built a good one.

Umbria Airlink

Umbria Airlink is a joint Busitalia and Trenitalia service that connects the railway stations of Perugia and Assisi with the airport at Sant’Egidio in about 20 minutes. The route runs with a deliberately reduced number of stops, marked with Airlink graphics, and — this is the part that matters — the bus times are coordinated both with flight arrivals and departures and with the train times, so the connection into the wider regional network actually works.

The fare is €5.00 one way from either station, €2.50 for children aged 4 to 12, added to whatever your rail ticket costs. You can buy the whole thing — train plus bus — in a single transaction on trenitalia.com by selecting Perugia Airport as the origin or destination of the journey.

The catch is in the word “stations”. Both ends of this bus are railway stations, and in Umbria a railway station is very often not the town. Perugia and Assisi are both hill towns; budget for one more leg at the far end — a local bus, an escalator or a short taxi — rather than assuming the Airlink puts you at the door of your hotel or the Basilica.

Taxis, with published fixed fares

The airport publishes the taxi tariff, which removes the usual argument. The fixed fares apply to a base tariff of up to four passengers and are inclusive of any night and holiday supplement, wherever the driver came from:

For anywhere else the meter applies: €6.60 flagfall, €1.80 per kilometre, €0.20 per 30 seconds of waiting, €2.40 per km on holidays and €3.50 per km at night, €1.00 for luggage, with a 25% surcharge for a 5–6 seat van and 50% for 7–8 seats. There is also a per-person shared-vehicle tariff for larger groups, which the airport publishes alongside the fixed fares.

Do the arithmetic before you default to the bus. Assisi by taxi is €35 flat; four people on the Airlink is €20 plus a connection at the station and whatever it costs to get up the hill. For a couple the bus wins comfortably. For a family of four with luggage and a hotel in the old town, the taxi is close to even and much simpler.

The numbers: Radiotaxi Perugia +39 075 500 4888, IT Taxi Perugia +39 075 9930005, Radiotaxi Assisi +39 075 813100, IT Taxi Assisi +39 075 9930007. Bastia Umbra is served by individual drivers on mobile numbers listed by the airport.

Driving and parking

The airport is off the E45 / SS3bis dual carriageway at the “Ospedalicchio” exit, which is the reason it feels so much closer to everything than its passenger numbers suggest — Umbria, southern Tuscany and parts of Marche and Lazio are all reachable without a bad road.

Parking is six areas with more than 600 spaces, automated barriers, and — a genuine catch — open only 06:00 to 22:00, and not reservable. Eight spaces in front of the main entrance are reserved for passengers with reduced mobility, connected to the terminal by tactile paving, and free on presentation of the ticket at the dedicated exit lane.

Payment is at one of two automatic machines in the arrivals area, cash or Visa/Mastercard, with 20 minutes to leave afterwards. A lost ticket costs the actual stay, read off the number plate, plus €10.

Onward, without a car

Perugia — not the airport — is the hub for long-distance coaches, so a bus to Rome, Florence, Siena or the Marche coast means getting into the city first. Sulga runs Perugia to Rome and to Florence; SENA/Baltour, Contram, APM and others cover Tuscany and the Marche. The airport publishes the full list of operators and their phone numbers, which is worth a look if your trip continues beyond Umbria.

🛋️ 4. A €12 Lounge, and a Fast Track That Admits What It Is Not

Perugia has a genuine Business Lounge, and at €12.00 per person including VAT it is one of the better-value airside rooms in Italy. It is airside, past security, departing passengers only, open 07:00 to 22:00, and it holds a maximum of eight people — which tells you exactly what kind of room it is. Children up to 14 go free. You can also take the whole thing for exclusive use for up to three hours at €89.00, which for a small group or a working meeting is a bargain.

What is in it: unlimited dedicated Wi-Fi, a computer and workstation with printing, a six-seat meeting table, TV, a coffee station, live flight information, newspapers and magazines, Umbrian information material, sofas and armchairs, and a private toilet with a WC and a shower, with complimentary towels and a courtesy kit on request. Projector hire, catering from a welcome coffee up to a light buffet, and taxi or private-hire booking are all available as paid extras.

Booking is old-fashioned and clear: at the ticket office counters in the airport, or by writing to [email protected], and payment is made at the ticket office before access.

Fast Track costs €3.00, also bought at the ticket counters, free for under-12s, always active. The airport is refreshingly honest about what you get: it is a dedicated, marked lane into the area preceding the security filters — it does not entitle you to a dedicated security filter. After the lane you queue behind whoever else is already there. It is one entry per ticket, non-transferable, non-refundable if you do not use it, and it does not exempt you from your airline’s cabin-bag rules or the gate deadline. At €3 it is worth it on a busy summer morning and pointless in February.

Shopping is small and deliberately Umbrian. There is a café landside and a second food and drink outlet after security, the car hire desks in arrivals, and airside a shopping gallery selling chocolate, truffles, local food and wine, handmade ceramics and regional souvenirs. It is a better last-minute-present airport than its size implies, and a poor place to plan a meal.

🍽️ 5. Truffles, Chocolate and Torta al Testo

Umbria is the part of Italy that quietly feeds the rest of it, and almost none of that is in the terminal. Eat in Perugia, Assisi or the hilltowns.

• Torta al testo — the flatbread cooked on a hot disc and split open, filled with sausage and greens, or with prosciutto and cheese. It is the everyday Umbrian food, it costs almost nothing, and it is what to eat standing up between churches.
• Black truffles — Umbria is truffle country, and the airport shop sells them, which tells you how central they are to the region’s identity. On a plate, they arrive shaved over strangozzi, the thick hand-rolled local pasta.
• Norcineria — the pork butchery of Norcia is so well known that norcineria became the Italian word for the trade. Cured meats, salami, and the black-truffle version of everything.
• Perugia and chocolate — Perugia is Italy’s chocolate city, and the airport’s own account of the Franciscan sites in the city notes the new Città del Cioccolato near the Mercato Coperto. Boxes of it fill the airside gallery.
• Deruta-style ceramics — the airport lists handcrafted ceramics among the Umbrian products it sells, and hand-painted maiolica is the regional craft. Buy it in a hilltown workshop if you have time; buy it at the gate if you do not.
• Wine — the region’s reds and whites travel well and are underrated outside Italy. Ask for something local rather than something famous; Umbria rewards it.

💡 6. Insider: Assisi in the Eight Hundredth Year, and What Else Umbria Is For

The reason 2026 is different

2026 is eight hundred years since the death of St Francis of Assisi (1226–2026). The airport — which carries his name — is marking it with a commemorative version of its own logo and a programme of cultural and narrative work around the anniversary, and it explicitly casts itself as the door into the Franciscan places.

What that means for you as a traveller is straightforward and worth planning around: Assisi will be busier in 2026 than in a normal year, particularly around the Franciscan dates, and accommodation in the walled town is finite. Book earlier than you would otherwise, and consider staying in the valley or in a neighbouring hilltown and commuting up.

The Franciscan map, as the airport itself draws it

The airport’s own list of the Franciscan places is a genuinely good itinerary, and it stretches well beyond Assisi:

• Assisi — a UNESCO World Heritage site, the saint’s birthplace and burial place. The Papal Basilica of St Francis holds his tomb and the frescoes of Giotto and Cimabue; the Eremo delle Carceri on Monte Subasio and the Porziuncola complete the core.
• Rivotorto, where the Sacro Tugurio preserves the hut of the first friars, and Spoleto, where the sanctuary at Monteluco sits in an ancient sacred wood above the town.
• Gubbio, the town of the wolf, medieval and intact, in the hills to the north.
• Perugia, where the places Francis was imprisoned after the battle of Collestrada — in the area of the Mercato Coperto — have been excavated and are now open to visitors.
• Narni, whose Sacro Speco is a cleft in the rock in the middle of a wood with a stone cell built beside it, and Stroncone, whose convent tradition holds was founded by Francis himself.
• Beyond Umbria: La Verna in Tuscany, where he received the stigmata in 1224, and Greccio near Rieti, where he staged the first living nativity in 1223.

Linking them are the Cammini di Francesco, the Franciscan walking and cycling routes that connect hermitages, woods, sanctuaries and villages. If you have a week and reasonable legs, that is a better use of Umbria than a car.

Perugia, which is not a stopover

Perugia gets treated as the airport’s name and skipped, which is a mistake. It is a full hill city with a university, an Etruscan and medieval core, a covered market, a chocolate industry and a proper evening. Give it two nights rather than two hours.

The honest verdict on this airport

PEG is small in the good way: a Gae Aulenti building with olive trees in the car park, security you clear quickly, a €12 lounge with a shower in it, a €3 fast track that tells you the truth about itself, and a €5 bus timed to your flight. The costs are real too — fifteen destinations in summer and about five in winter, an airport that shuts at ten at night, and one full-service route that only exists in the warm half of the year.

Use Perugia when Umbria is the trip, and especially in 2026, when Assisi is the trip. If you need frequency, connections or a flight at an awkward hour, Rome is two hours away by coach from Perugia and will always have more of everything.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

📊 2026 Summary Data Table