The Riviera makes you work for it at the very end. Your flight lands at Nice; your week is in Cannes, a little under thirty kilometres west along the same coast. In an ordinary week the gap is trivial — a pleasant half-hour beside the sea. In the third week of June, when Cannes Lions fills the town and the whole advertising world is trying to use the same road at the same time, that small gap becomes the first real decision of your trip. How you cross it sets the tone for everything that follows.
There are, broadly, five ways to do it: the train, a taxi, a ride-hailing car, a pre-booked chauffeur, and — because this is the Riviera — a helicopter. None of them is wrong. The trick is matching the method to your luggage, your schedule and your tolerance for sitting still with a view of the motorway.
Nice Côte d’Azur Airport
Nice Côte d’Azur is the busiest airport in France outside Paris, and it wears the role lightly: two terminals on a flat reach of coast at the western edge of the city, the sea on one side and the hills on the other. Conveniently, it is already pointing the right way — Cannes lies west along the same shoreline, so you are not crossing the region so much as continuing down it.
Which is why the problem here is never really distance. It is what sits in the way during festival week: a coast road and the A8 motorway that, for a few days in June, an entire industry is trying to travel at once. Plan around the traffic, not the kilometres.
The Train Option
The terminals have no mainline platform of their own, so the rail route runs through the city: the airport tramway links both terminals to central Nice, and from there the coastal railway runs west to Cannes frequently and in well under an hour. Its great virtue in festival week is simple — a train ignores the traffic completely. While the boulevards seize up, it keeps its own time, which during Cannes Lions makes it the most reliable clock you own.
The costs are the ordinary ones. There is a change and a tram to manage, your luggage on and off, and the last stretch from Cannes station down to a Croisette hotel — a short walk or a brief taxi in the June heat. Travellers carrying little love the train and rightly so. Anyone with a heavy case and a meeting on landing will feel every seam in the journey.
Taxi and Ride-Hailing
Official taxis wait outside both terminals — metered and regulated — and ride-hailing apps operate across the region. Door to door, no changes, your bags in the boot: the appeal is obvious and, most of the year, entirely sound.
The caveat is just as obvious, and specific to the week. The same congestion that makes the train look clever makes a car look optimistic. A run that is quick on a quiet Tuesday can stretch unhappily on the festival Monday, and in a metered taxi the clock keeps its own opinion of the delay. If you go by road during the Lions, go in with open eyes and a generous sense of time.
Chauffeur Services
A pre-booked car is the taxi’s more composed cousin: a price agreed in advance, a driver who tracks your flight, and someone holding your name at arrivals while the rank forms behind them. It does not beat the traffic — nothing on four wheels does during festival week — but it removes the friction around it. No queue, no surge, no negotiation, no wondering whether the car will come.
For travellers landing straight into a day of meetings, the value is less about speed than about arriving without having had to think. You step off the plane and the logistics are already someone else’s problem, which on the festival Monday is worth more than the minutes.
The problem is never the distance. It is what sits in the way during festival week.
Helicopter Transfers
And then there is the option the Riviera more or less invented for itself. Helicopter transfers operate along the coast — most visibly in summer and during the big events — and the hop from Nice toward a Cannes heliport is a matter of minutes, runway to landing pad faster than a car can clear the airport forecourt.
It comes with the obvious asterisks: it depends on the weather, it is by some distance the most expensive way to cover the ground, and during Cannes Lions it is also among the least remarkable sights in the sky. For the genuinely time-poor — and the price-blind — nothing else competes.
Which Option Makes Sense?
Honestly, it depends on three things: how much you are carrying, how tightly your day is scheduled, and how you feel about money. If you are travelling light and value certainty above comfort, take the train — it is the one option festival traffic cannot touch. If you are landing into meetings and would rather arrive composed than early, book a chauffeur. If you take a taxi, do it knowingly. And if the budget is not the question and the diary is unforgiving, the helicopter exists precisely for you.
There is no single right answer, only the one that fits your week. The mistake is to decide on the kerb, jet-lagged, with a queue building behind you.
Final Notes
Whatever you choose, choose it before you fly. Festival week rewards the booked and punishes the improviser — cars, drivers and seats all thin out as the Monday approaches. Build in more time than the map suggests; the map has not met Cannes Lions. And treat the journey as part of the trip rather than the dull preface to it. On this coast, arriving well is less a luxury than the difference between starting your week and merely surviving its first morning.