Getting from John Wayne Airport to the city

The bus, and its hours

• OCTA route 76 is the airport's only local bus, running between John Wayne Airport and Huntington Beach.
• It operates 06:00 to 18:00, Monday to Friday. There is no weekend service and no evening service.
• The stop is in front of Terminal A, pillar 2, on the Arrival (lower) Level.
• That is the complete public bus offer here, and it is why almost everyone who lands at SNA leaves in a car.

The trains

• There is no rail station at the airport. The nearest are Irvine, Santa Ana and Tustin, all roughly 10 miles away.
• Metrolink and Amtrak both serve them, and Metrolink's Orange County Line runs up towards Los Angeles and down towards Oceanside and San Diego.
• The closest Greyhound stop is at Santa Ana train station.
• Getting to any of them from the airport means a taxi or a rideshare, which rather undoes the saving.

What people actually use

• Taxis wait in the Ground Transportation Center and in Terminal C, both on the Arrival (lower) Level.
• Shuttles require a 24-hour advance reservation and are arranged in the Ground Transportation Center.
• Lyft, Uber and Wingz all operate with designated pickup points.
• Courtesy hotel shuttles run for a long list of nearby hotels.

Why fly here

• John Wayne is in Santa Ana, in the middle of Orange County, close to Newport Beach, Irvine, Anaheim and Disneyland.
• It is much closer to those places than LAX, which is 65 km north-west through some of the worst traffic in the United States.
• The airport has a strict noise curfew - no commercial departures late at night - which is why the last flights leave earlier than you might expect.
• It is small, and it wins customer satisfaction awards for being small. The trade for that is the transport network outside the door.