Pisa Airport to Florence: Every Option and What It Costs

A lot of people arrive in Tuscany through Pisa rather than Florence, because the flights are cheaper and there are more of them. Then they discover that the airport and the city they actually want are eighty kilometres apart, and that nobody has explained the connection clearly.

So here it is with real numbers. The shuttle prices come from the operator’s own site, where they are buried inside an image rather than written as text, and the train fares from Trenitalia’s booking system.

The three options, compared

The train wins for almost everybody, and the reason is the fourth column rather than the first two. It is the only option that ends in the middle of Florence, at Santa Maria Novella, from which most of the historic centre is a walk.

The train, step by step

It is two vehicles, and knowing that in advance removes most of the confusion.

First the PisaMover. This is an automated shuttle linking the airport to Pisa Centrale station, and it is worth saying clearly that it is not run by Trenitalia, which is why the airport does not appear in Trenitalia’s own journey planner and why people conclude, wrongly, that there is no connection.

Then the train. From Pisa Centrale to Florence Santa Maria Novella we found thirty-nine direct services across the day, from 9.80 euros, with the fastest taking exactly an hour. The first leaves at 04:15 and the last at 22:30.

That is a lot of trains. On this leg you do not need a plan, you need to walk to the departure board.

The combined ticket saves nothing, and buy it anyway

You can buy the whole journey as a single ticket from the airport to Florence. When we priced it, the best itinerary came out at 16.30 euros and 1h 18.

Now do the addition: 6.50 for the shuttle plus 9.80 for the train is 16.30 exactly. The combined ticket is not a discount, it is the two fares stapled together.

Buy it anyway. Not because it is cheaper, but because it means one purchase instead of two, on a machine, in a language you may not read, with luggage, after a flight. The saving is in attention rather than money, and that is worth more than nothing when you have just landed.

One caveat from the shuttle operator’s own terms: a standalone PisaMover ticket is valid for thirty days, but tickets bought in combination with a rail journey through Trenitalia are excluded from that. Treat the combined ticket as tied to your train.

The half hour most people lose

This is the same trap we found on the day trips out of Florence, and it applies in this direction too.

Trenitalia runs two kinds of regional train on this line. The Regionale stops everywhere. The Regionale Veloce does not. On the day we checked, the fastest service did Pisa Centrale to Florence in exactly one hour, and slower ones took twenty minutes longer for the same 9.80 euros.

Regional fares are set by distance, not by speed, so there is no premium for the fast one. Look at the service type on the board before you board. It is the cheapest twenty minutes you will ever save.

The corollary, and it is the single most useful thing here: do not book this leg in advance. The fare is fixed, so an advance ticket buys you no saving and ties you to a departure you might miss while you are still waiting for a suitcase.

If your flight lands late

This is where the cheap flight stops being cheap, and almost nothing written about Pisa mentions it.

Read those two rows together and the constraint is obvious. The shuttle is not the problem, the train is. The shuttle is still running for an hour and a half after the last train to Florence has gone.

So if you land after about ten at night, you are not getting to Florence by train. Your options become the bus, a taxi across eighty kilometres of motorway, or a night in Pisa and the 04:15 or something civilised in the morning. Of those, a cheap room in Pisa is usually the least bad, and it has the side effect of letting you see the Piazza dei Miracoli at eight in the morning with nobody in it.

Worth checking your arrival time against that 22:30 before you book the flight, not after.

The bus, and where it really drops you

There are direct buses between Pisa airport and Florence, and on price they beat the train: Flibco advertises from 12.90 euros for a journey of about an hour, which is faster than the train door to door and three euros cheaper.

The catch is in the small print of the route. The Florence stop is Via Guidoni 222, which is out by the airport road and not the historic centre, with Santa Maria Novella served only at night. So on a daytime arrival you save three euros and then need a tram or a taxi to finish the journey, which gives the three euros back and costs you the time.

Our read: the bus is the better option late at night, when the train has stopped and the Santa Maria Novella stop is the one in use. During the day, take the train.

From Florence airport, for comparison

To decide between the two airports you need the other half of the sum, so here it is. Florence has its own airport, Amerigo Vespucci, also called Peretola, and getting from it to the centre is a different order of problem.

There is a tram, the T2, which runs from the airport to Piazza San Marco, at the edge of the historic centre, with no changes. The stop is a couple of minutes on foot from the terminal. The fare, from the tram operator’s own price list, is a standard city ticket:

Fourteen euros thirty and an hour of difference. That is the real penalty for flying into Pisa, and it is the number to hold against the fare difference when you are choosing flights.

One warning about the tram that catches people with holiday luggage. Large bags need their own ticket. A bag up to 10 kg and 55 by 40 by 20 centimetres travels free; anything bigger requires an extra ticket, and bags over 80 by 45 by 25 centimetres or 20 kg are not allowed on board at all. For two people with two large suitcases that quietly doubles the fare, and it is still under five euros.

Pisa or Florence airport

Google asks this in the suggestion box for both airports, so it is worth answering plainly rather than diplomatically.

Fly into Pisa if the fare is more than about fifteen euros a head cheaper, and into Florence if it is not. That is not a rule of thumb, it is the difference between the two transfers worked out in the table above: 16.30 euros against 2.00, and an hour and twenty against twenty minutes. If the Pisa flight saves you eighty euros, take it and stop thinking about it. If it saves you ten, you are paying to spend an extra hour on public transport with your luggage.

The calculation changes in exactly one situation, and it is the one above: a late arrival. A cheap flight that lands at 23:00 in Pisa has no train, and whatever you save on the ticket you spend on a taxi or a hotel you did not plan for.

One more thing worth knowing if Pisa is your entry point: you are already at the start of the coastal line, which makes the Cinque Terre far easier from here than from Florence, and the leaning tower is closer to the airport than Florence is. If your flight lands in the morning, seeing Pisa before continuing costs you very little. We cover what a visit there involves in our guide to day trips.

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