Everything below is a road we actually drive. Cielo.Travel runs its transfers through Safe Transfers by Cielo.Travel, which means a vetted driver, a car that is insured for the route, a price agreed before you get in, and somebody answering the phone if the plan changes at the airport. There is no meter, no auction, and no stranger deciding what the ride is worth once you are already in it.
Use the booker to price and confirm any of these. Then read the guide for wherever you are going, because a transfer is only half the day.
Book a Cartagena transfer
Airport to hotel, hotel to airport, round trip, or the run east along the coast. Pick the direction, tell us the date, and you get a fixed price before you commit.
Prefer to ask first? Message us on WhatsApp and a person will answer.
Jump to: Starting at CTG · East along the coast · What you are actually booking · Other cities
Starting at Rafael Núñez
Cartagena's airport is inside the city. Rafael Núñez International (CTG) sits in the Crespo neighborhood on the northern seafront, and by the airport's own reckoning that is ten minutes from the walled city and fifteen from the hotel peninsula of Bocagrande. There is no mountain and no hour of highway. What there is, at the door, is a queue and four different ways to pay for the same short drive.
CTG to your hotel in Cartagena
Walled city, Getsemaní, Bocagrande, Manga, or a hotel out on the islands road — the driver meets you inside arrivals with a sign. Short drive, fixed price, nobody negotiating with you in the heat while you hold your bags.
East along the coast
Everything else out of Cartagena runs east, along the Caribbean, towards the Magdalena's mouth and then the Sierra Nevada. These are the three drives people actually make: the working city an hour or so away, the base for the park, and the beach village past it. All three are served by buses, and all three are the kind of trip where a private car stops being a luxury once there is luggage, a child or a schedule involved.
Cartagena to Barranquilla
The Caribbean's working city: a river port at the mouth of the Magdalena with no colonial wall, no UNESCO old town and no beach worth flying for, and the most interesting city on the coast anyway. It exports glass, footballers and Shakira, and it throws the biggest party in the country every year.
Cartagena to Santa Marta
The standard coast move, and usually the second half of a first trip to Colombia: out of the walled city and east to the base for Tayrona, Minca and the Sierra Nevada. It is a straightforward run in daylight and a different proposition after dark.
Cartagena to Palomino
Straight through to the beach village where the Sierra Nevada runs out into the Caribbean: a river coming down off the snow, a long beach of grey-gold sand with surf on it, and a strip of lodges between the highway and the water. It is well past Santa Marta, over the line into La Guajira, and it is a long way to arrive at night.
What you are actually booking
A private transfer, not a seat on somebody else's schedule. The car is yours for the route, the driver is one of ours, and the price you see in the booker is the price at the end — tolls and parking included, no surcharge for a late flight, no renegotiation at the door.
You can put stops in the plan — a town on the way, lunch, a viewpoint — and the quote accounts for them rather than penalizing you later. If you want the day to be more than the drive, a guided tour is usually the better purchase, and every card above links to the one we run there. If the route you want is not listed, ask: the list is what we publish, not what we can do.
Other cities
The same service runs out of Bogotá, Medellín and Santa Marta. Start at the Colombia transfers hub for the full list, including the airport transfers we run in cities with no day-trip routes of their own.
Every destination above has its own guide in Colombia Travel Guides.
