Flying Between the Islands

Two airlines carry almost all the traffic between the Canary Islands — Binter Canarias and Canaryfly — and the flights are so short that the cabin crew are serving you before the aircraft has finished climbing. A typical island hop lasts between twenty and forty-five minutes gate to gate. The longest routes across the archipelago, corner to corner, still come in under an hour.

This is not like flying anywhere else in Europe. The aircraft are small propeller planes for the most part, the airports are compact, the check-in queues are short, and the whole thing feels closer to catching a train than boarding an international flight. Islanders use these planes the way people in Britain use an intercity service: for a meeting, a hospital appointment, a football match, a Sunday lunch with family.

For a visitor, the question is almost always the same one — plane or ferry? The short answer is that flying wins on time and loses on price and flexibility, and which matters depends entirely on which two islands you are moving between.

The two airlines

Binter Canarias is the big one, founded in 1989 and now the dominant carrier within the archipelago. It flies a fleet of ATR turboprops on the inter-island network plus larger Embraer jets on longer routes to mainland Spain, Madeira and West Africa. Its hubs are Gran Canaria and Tenerife North, and it reaches every inhabited island in the group, including the small strips on La Gomera and El Hierro.

Canaryfly is the smaller competitor, also turboprop-operated, concentrating on the busiest trunk routes between the main islands. Where it flies, it tends to undercut Binter, which is the main reason to check both.

Between them they run a genuinely dense schedule. The Gran Canaria–Tenerife corridor has departures most hours through the day; the routes to the smaller western islands run a few times daily. Book direct with either airline or through the usual agents; both sell online in English.

How long the flights actually take

Scheduled block times across the network sit roughly in this band:

Add the usual airport overhead at both ends and a thirty-minute flight becomes a two-and-a-half-hour journey door to door. That is still dramatically quicker than the sea equivalent on the longer routes, and barely quicker at all on the short ones.

The resident discount, and why it is not for you

You will read online about a huge discount on Canarian flights, and it is real: residents of the islands travel at a steep percentage discount on inter-island fares, subsidised by the Spanish state as compensation for insularity. It is one of the reasons islanders treat a flight as unremarkable.

It applies to registered residents only, verified against the municipal register, and there is no version of it for visitors. Do not build a budget around a headline fare you saw quoted somewhere — check the actual price for your dates as a non-resident. As 2026 framing, visitor fares on the main routes commonly fall somewhere in the range of forty to a hundred euros one way, higher at short notice and in peak weeks, lower if you book early and travel midweek.

Baggage — the pleasant surprise

Compared with the low-cost carriers most British and Irish visitors arrive on, inter-island baggage rules are generous. Both airlines have historically allowed a decent cabin bag as standard and included or cheaply added a checked bag on most fare types, and neither runs the aggressive gate-side bag-measuring culture familiar from a Luton departure gate.

That said, fare families change, so check what your specific ticket includes before you buy. The aircraft are small, overhead bins are small with them, and larger cabin bags are routinely taken at the aircraft steps and handed back to you there on arrival — a process that takes about ninety seconds and is not worth arguing about.

If you are connecting from a long-haul or UK flight, be aware that inter-island tickets bought separately are separate contracts: a delay on the first leg is your problem, not the airline's. Leave a real gap, and read our page on what you are entitled to when a flight goes wrong.

The bizcocho: a genuinely Canarian ritual

Here is the detail nobody tells you. On Binter's inter-island flights, however short, the cabin crew come through with a drink and a small sponge cake — a bizcocho or bizcochito, wrapped, faintly lemony, of a kind sold in Canarian bakeries. On a twenty-five-minute hop this means the trolley starts moving roughly as the wheels leave the ground and finishes as the descent begins.

Islanders are genuinely attached to it. It is a recognised piece of Canarian popular culture, joked about, complained about when the recipe changes, and mentioned in conversation the way the British mention a British Airways bacon roll. If somebody on the island asks whether you got your little cake, this is what they mean. It is also, practically speaking, why nobody bothers eating before an inter-island flight.

When flying beats the ferry

Flying wins clearly when:

• You are crossing the whole archipelago — Lanzarote to La Palma, say, where the sea route is a long day and the flight is under an hour.
• You are heading to El Hierro, where the ferry from Tenerife takes the best part of three hours and is often lumpy.
• You have one week and want two islands. A day lost to a ferry is a meaningful fraction of the holiday.
• You are prone to seasickness. The Atlantic between these islands is open ocean, and the swell in some channels is serious — the detail is in our page on which crossings are roughest.

The ferry wins when you are taking a hire car (which no plane will carry, and which changes everything about how you see a small island), when the islands are close together, when you have more time than money, or when you simply want to be on deck watching Teide come up out of the sea. Tenerife to San Sebastián de La Gomera is under an hour by fast ferry from Los Cristianos, which no flight can beat once you count airport time. The whole comparison, route by route, is in ferries between the islands.

Which airports you will use

Tenerife is the one to watch. The island has two airports, and inter-island flights overwhelmingly use Tenerife North, above La Laguna, not Tenerife South where your charter from Britain landed. They are an hour apart by road. Booking a connection without noticing this is the classic Canarian travel mistake — our page on Tenerife North explains what is there and how to reach it, and the airports guide covers all eight.

The small airports are a pleasure. La Gomera's strip near Playa de Santiago and El Hierro's at Valverde handle a handful of movements a day, and you walk from the aircraft to the car park in under five minutes. La Palma's runway sits on a shelf above the sea just north of Santa Cruz de La Palma, with an approach that is genuinely beautiful and occasionally, when the cloud sits on the ridge, results in a diversion.

Island-hopping in practice

A common and sensible pattern for two weeks is to fly one way and sail the other: fly out to the far island to save the day, come back by ferry with a hire car and a sea view. Another is to use Gran Canaria or Tenerife North as a hub, taking short hops out and back rather than trying to chain islands in a ring, since not every pair of islands has a direct service.

If your interest is the observatories above the clouds on La Palma, or seeing how the island has recovered since the 2021 eruption, flying is clearly the right call from anywhere except Tenerife. For walkers heading to La Gomera, the ferry usually is. Our worked island-hopping itineraries put the combinations together with realistic timings.

So, is it worth flying?

For any journey that the sea makes into a half-day, yes, without hesitation — the fares are reasonable by European standards, the planes are frequent, and you get the small cake. For short, well-served crossings like Tenerife to La Gomera or Lanzarote to Fuerteventura, the ferry is usually quicker once you count getting to an airport, and much better value if you want a car at the other end. Check both airlines, check the dates either side, and above all check which Tenerife airport your ticket says. For the wider picture of moving around the archipelago, start with getting around the Canary Islands.