Landing at Bandaranaike International Airport

What CMB is like

Sri Lanka is an island where people tend to keep moving the moment they land, some onto the train to Kandy and Ella, others south to the beaches around Galle. Bandaranaike sits north of Colombo rather than in it, so a good number of arrivals never enter the capital at all and drive straight to their first destination. The terminal is not large and the arrivals process is fairly direct. What needs thought is the route afterwards, because travel on this island always takes longer than the map suggests.

On arrival

Enable the line as soon as you land; the walk is short and service usually arrives before the desks. If you travelled on an online entry authorisation, have the evidence saved on the device or screenshotted before you fly, because the counter is a bad place to be searching an inbox. Past reclaim and customs you come out to a hall full of drivers waiting and voices calling from several directions, so walk clear of it before you start reading messages from your accommodation. A lot of flights here land in the middle of the night, which is exactly when confirming a pre-booked car matters most.

How far the airport Wi-Fi gets you

Airport Wi-Fi is available, but it sits behind a verification step and the session is time limited. When several night arrivals come in together the registration page noticeably slows. Worth remembering too: the expressway out of the airport offers nothing public to connect to, and a lot of accommodation on this island runs a connection that depends on local power. If you need to tell someone when you are arriving, your own line is what makes that simple rather than a series of attempts.

Getting into town

An expressway links the airport to Colombo, which makes the journey shorter than the map distance suggests. Your options are a car arranged by your accommodation, an airport taxi, or a ride-hailing booking, which works around Colombo. If your first destination is a southern beach or a hill town you are in for several more hours on the road, and that is where the data genuinely earns its keep: the map, reading about somewhere to stop, and telling your host when to expect you. Allow 300 to 600MB for that first travel day, because long drives tend to end with music or video filling the time.

What people ask about this airport

• Keep entry documents offline — Screenshot your entry authorisation so you are not searching an inbox while standing at the counter.
• Most flights land at night — If you pre-booked a car, reconfirm before you fly and keep the driver's number saved on the device.
• The long drives eat the data — Runs to the southern beaches or up into the hills take hours, and that is when people stream the most.