Salzburg Airport ground transport

Salzburg handled 1,774,454 passengers in 2025 and leads a double life. Through the summer it fills with visitors doing Mozart, the fortress and the lake district; from December it fills with skiers on charter flights from Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia heading for the valleys south of the city. The terminal sits four kilometres west of the old town and a few kilometres from the German border. Two city buses serve it and choosing the wrong one costs time: line 10 runs Monday to Saturday every fifteen minutes and reaches the centre in about fifteen, while line 2 runs daily every fifteen to twenty minutes and takes roughly twenty-three, but goes to the Hauptbahnhof, which is what you want if a train is the next leg. A single is around €2.50, a 24-hour ticket about €6, and the Salzburg Card includes three days of public transport if you are sightseeing anyway. For the mountains, the useful detail is that regional Postbus services leave from directly in front of the terminal rather than from the city. Postbus 260 is the important one — it runs to Zell am See without a change, calling at Lofer, Saalfelden and Maishofen on the way, and takes about an hour and three quarters for €12-15. Line 270 connects towards Eben on a reduced winter timetable for the Ski amadé area, and lines 180 and 181 cover Wals and the border towns. Rail is the answer for Gastein: hourly ÖBB InterCity services run from Salzburg Hauptbahnhof to Bad Gastein directly in about an hour and twenty. There is no railway at all to Saalbach-Hinterglemm, which is why almost everyone going there books a transfer.