Reus is the airport Salou was built around. It sits inland behind the resort, close enough that the transfer is over almost before it has begun, and small enough that in high summer the arrivals hall empties in waves rather than a steady trickle.
Nearly everyone lands here already knowing where they are going. What they have not usually decided is how.
The number to hold on to
Twenty minutes. That is a car from the terminal door to the middle of Salou on an ordinary day, covering roughly seventeen kilometres of unremarkable flat road.
Every option below is measured against that. Some cost far less and take a little longer. One costs more and removes every decision. None of them is wrong, but they suit very different arrivals, which is how this note is arranged.
If there are two of you with cabin bags
Take the coach. Plana runs the airport service, the stop is immediately outside the terminal doors, and the fare is a few euros a head — currently somewhere around seven for a single, with a return costing meaningfully less than two singles.
The run into Salou takes about half an hour once the intermediate stops are counted. For an unencumbered pair arriving in daylight, that ten-minute penalty against a car is not worth paying to avoid.
One thing to check before you commit to this plan: services are timed around flight arrivals rather than a fixed clock, and they thin out sharply once the summer season ends. A February arrival may find nothing waiting at all.
If there are children and hold luggage
This is where the coach stops making sense. It sets down at a stop on the main road, not at your door, and the last few hundred metres with cases, a pushchair and a tired four-year-old is the part nobody pictures when they book.
Two realistic answers. The rank outside arrivals will take four people with luggage in a standard car; beyond that you are into two vehicles and two fares, and the arithmetic turns quickly. Or you arrange a car in advance, which for a group of five or six in one larger vehicle usually lands under the cost of splitting.
Families are the reason airport transfers Reus to Salou is such a busy search in the first place — the geography is trivial, but the logistics of moving a household twenty minutes down a road are not.
If you land after dark
Take the rank, or have something already arranged. Taxis wait outside the terminal around the clock and there is generally one there, so a late arrival is never stranded.
Fares are metered rather than fixed, and the airport authority publishes an indicative figure for Salou in the mid-thirties of euros. Night hours, weekends and public holidays all carry supplements, so treat any published number as a floor rather than a quote.
The rank is the option that does not care what time it is or whether your flight was two hours late. That is most of what you are paying for.
If you are not staying in the centre
Salou is bigger than the strip along the main beach. If your address is out on Cap Salou, up in the streets behind Ponent, or in one of the apartment blocks towards Vila-seca, the coach leaves you with a second leg to solve, uphill and in the heat.
Arranging a car beforehand mostly buys you the removal of that second leg. The driver has the address, the price was agreed weeks ago, and the flight number is being watched — which matters at an airport where a single delayed charter can empty the rank for twenty minutes.
If the holiday involves leaving Salou
Then hire, and pick the car up at the airport rather than in town. The desks sit in the terminal, the roads out here are flat and well signed, and parking at the airport end is a non-problem.
Be honest with yourself about whether you will use it. A week spent between the beach, the promenade and the theme park is a week in which a hire car sits in a paid space depreciating. Parking in central Salou in August is genuinely unpleasant, and the resort is small enough to walk end to end.
The four options, side by side
| Option | Door to door | Suits | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plana coach | about 30 min | Couples, light luggage, daylight | Drops at a stop, not your hotel |
| Taxi rank | about 20 min | Late arrivals, up to four people | Metered; supplements at night |
| Car arranged ahead | about 20 min | Families, groups, villa addresses | Costs more; decided weeks earlier |
| Hire car | about 20 min plus paperwork | Trips beyond the resort | Parking, and paying for idle days |
One thing worth knowing
Some airlines sell this airport as "Barcelona Reus". It is not Barcelona, and the two are about a hundred kilometres apart. If your paperwork says one thing and your boarding pass says REU, your arrival plan needs to be built around Tarragona province, not the city up the coast.
People who booked expecting Barcelona sometimes decide, standing at the rank, to press on to the city anyway. It is a long, expensive way to start a holiday. Salou is twenty minutes away and Barcelona is well over an hour; the sensible move is to settle in first and treat the city as a day out later in the week.
Once you are here, the resort itself is easy to read: the shore divides into the long main beach and the coves round the headland, and getting between them takes no planning at all — see the note on moving around. Current airport information is published by the airport operator, coach routes by Plana, and general resort information by the Salou tourist board.