More readers of this site are sitting in Istanbul than in any other city, Damascus included. That is not a figure of speech — it is what the analytics say, and it changes what is worth writing down. If you are reading this from Fatih or Esenyurt or Başakşehir, planning the trip you have been putting off, this page is for you specifically rather than for a generic traveller.
What follows is the part we can speak to with authority: the arrival, and the car. We do not sell flights, we do not advise on documents, and we will say plainly further down which questions are not ours to answer.
The two airports, and why it matters which one you leave from
Istanbul has two, and they are nowhere near each other. Istanbul Airport (IST) sits on the European side to the northwest; Sabiha Gökçen (SAW) is on the Asian side to the southeast. Turkish Airlines flies from IST, Pegasus from SAW. Crossing the city between them is not a taxi ride you want to discover on the morning of the flight.
Check which airport your ticket says before you plan the day around it. People who have lived in Istanbul for years still get caught by this, and the cost of getting it wrong is the trip.
We do not publish schedules or flight times here. Routes and frequencies change, and a rental company that tells you when the aeroplane leaves is telling you something it has not checked. The airlines publish that themselves and it takes a minute to look up.
Landing at Damascus International
Damascus International Airport is about 30 kilometres southeast of the city centre, out past the last of the orchards on the road towards Sweida. The drive into the centre takes roughly twenty-five to forty-five minutes depending on the hour and where in the city you are heading.
That distance is the whole reason this article exists in the shape it does. Arriving on a late flight with luggage, after a day that started at an Istanbul metro station, is not the moment to be negotiating a fare in a currency you have not handled in years. Whatever you do about the car, decide it before you land rather than in the arrivals hall.
How the car reaches you
We deliver to Damascus International at no charge, and delivery anywhere inside Damascus is free as well. As of September 2026 those two are the only places on our list that cost nothing — the others carry a flat fee, which the third article in this series sets out.
The shape of it is simple. You send us your flight number when you book. You come out of arrivals. The car is there, and you drive into the city yourself.
Send the flight number rather than the arrival time. This is the single most useful thing you can do, and it is the one people skip. Arrival times move — an hour on the tarmac at Istanbul, a headwind, a gate — and a flight number lets us follow the change on our side without a chain of messages from a phone that may not have signal yet. An arrival time you typed in three weeks ago is a guess; a flight number is a fact that updates itself.
If you would rather see the mechanics of the airport meeting in more detail, they are on the car rental at Damascus Airport page, and the city deliveries are covered under renting a car in Damascus.
What you need in your hand at the counter
This is the part residents of Türkiye ask about most, and the answer is shorter than expected.
Your driving licence. We accept licences issued by any country. A Turkish licence is accepted exactly as a German, Emirati, American or Syrian one is. There is no nationality condition on hiring from us — we are not asking what passport you hold, we are asking whether you can drive. Nor is there any minimum time you must have held it: a licence that is valid on your dates is the whole of the requirement.
The physical licence, not a photograph of it. A picture on a phone is not a document, and the phone is usually the thing with no battery left after a flight.
Your passport, which you will have with you in any case.
Age 23 or over for anyone who is going to drive. If your brother is going to take a turn on the road north, he needs to meet that too, and it is easier to put both names on the booking than to add one at the kerb.
Nothing is converted, translated through us, or exchanged for a local equivalent. The licence in your wallet is the licence we work with.
The two questions that are not ours
We would rather draw this line than blur it, because blurring it is how a rental company ends up being quoted on something it has no standing in.
What the rental company requires is the paragraph above, and we stand behind it.
What you personally need in order to enter the country, and what the law requires you to carry while driving, is a different question. It depends on your passport, your residence status in Türkiye, and rules that change. Ask the Syrian diplomatic mission in Türkiye, and — for the driving half — whoever issues International Driving Permits where you live. Both answers apply to you specifically rather than to a traveller in general. We have written separately about what an International Driving Permit actually is, which explains the document itself without pretending to tell you the law.
The first drive
The road from the airport into Damascus is the one route nearly every visitor drives, and it is an ordinary motorway run rather than an initiation. Traffic thickens as you approach the city. Damascus rush hours are real — roughly eight to ten in the morning, and four until well past seven in the evening — and inside those windows a crossing of the centre takes three or four times what the map promises.
Fuel is handed to you full and comes back full, so there is nothing to settle on the way out and one stop to make at the end near wherever you are returning the car.
If you are not staying in Damascus, the country is smaller than it looks from abroad. Homs is about 162 km up the M5, and Aleppo about 355 km — a drive we have described properly in the M5 route from Damascus to Aleppo, which is worth reading before you promise anybody an arrival time. One-way hire is available if your trip ends somewhere other than where it started: collect in Damascus, hand the car over in Aleppo or on the coast in Latakia. Arrange it at booking time, not on the last morning.
A short list before you fly
- Confirm whether your ticket leaves from IST or SAW, and plan the Istanbul end around that.
- Book the car before you fly. Cancellation is free, so an early booking costs nothing if the date moves.
- Give us the flight number, not the arrival time.
- Pack the physical licence, held a year or more, and check every intended driver is 23 or over.
- Ask the consulate about anything to do with entry and documents, and ask us about anything to do with the car.
The rest of it is a drive into a city you know. Most of the questions people write to us with before a first trip back turn out to have plain answers, and the ones that do not are on the questions page or a message away.
