Brussels’ airports are 14–59 km from Grand-Place
A ticket names the city, not the airport. Which of the 2 it means is the difference between Zaventem, 14 km out, and Charleroi at 59 km — 4.2× the distance, on the ground, in your own time.
Two tickets to Brussels, two different afternoons
- By car, clear roads
- 20 min
- On public transport
- 32 min
- By car, clear roads
- 55 min
- On public transport
- 1h 16m
45 km of difference — outside the fare, on your time and at your expense, and again on the way home. Cheap tickets are more often the second one. Check which three-letter code is printed next to Brussels on yours.
Every airport, measured
from Grand-Place- ZaventemBRUclosest14km from Grand-Place
20 min by car, clear roads · 32 min on public transport · train IC
- CharleroiCRLfurthest59km from Grand-Place
55 min by car, clear roads · 1h 16m on public transport · train S2 → bus flibco 12 · 1 change
What the measurements show
Getting to Charleroi by public transport costs 21 min over the drive
Both figures are measured, and the slower one is the only published answer. What the difference costs to buy back is not on this page: we do not estimate a taxi fare we were not quoted.
- CharleroiCRL1h 16m vs 55 min · train S2 → bus flibco 12
Price the whole journey, not the flight into Brussels
This page measures distances that do not change. Prices and departure times change hourly, so they are not here — Pathioo fetches those live, adds the journey to and from the airport at both ends, and gives you one total from address to address.
Where these numbers come from
Every kilometre is a Google Directions API response, measured on 2026-09-16 from Grand-Place to the terminal — to the airport's own address, not to a point on a map. Those are two different things and they can differ by a factor of two.
We measure the shortest route at four in the morning, because a road chosen around traffic describes the traffic and not the distance: asked of Gatwick and central London it returned 83 km at rush hour and 45 km overnight. That is why driving times are given as "clear roads" — a floor, not a promise.
Transit is the fastest published run with no departure time attached, and where two runs finish within five minutes of each other the one with fewer changes is the one shown. Every leg is measured into the airport, never back: a timetable is not symmetric, and the direction with a deadline is the one worth printing.
You will not find a ticket price, a departure time or an airline here. Those live shorter than this page does, and appear only in the search itself, straight from the airline's API.