Parking at Sharjah Airport

The airport runs its own car parks and publishes no prices for any of them. That is the useful thing to know before you drive here, and it is not a gap in this page: the operator’s own website lists the car parks and gives no tariff, in either of its languages, and no booking platform covers this airport either.

So the honest version is: the parking exists, it is straightforward to use, and what it costs you will find out at the barrier.

What the airport actually has

Premium parking at departures. The area by the terminal doors on the departures side, for dropping somebody off and for short stops. This is where you stop if the whole visit is measured in minutes.

Premium parking at arrivals. The same idea on the other side of the journey, and the one that catches people out: meeting a flight takes longer than dropping one off, because passport control, baggage and customs sit between the landing you watched on the board and the person walking through the door.

Long-term parking. A separate car park for stays from a day upwards. This is the one that matters if you are leaving the car while you travel, and it is not the one signposted from the terminal doors.

There is one passenger terminal, so there is no question of which building’s car park you want. Everything above serves the same one.

Why there is no price on this page

Two things are true at once, and both are worth stating plainly.

The operator publishes no tariff. Not a daily rate, not an hourly one, not a free-period-before-charging. The car parks are listed as facilities and priced nowhere.

There is no online booking, and no aggregator. The prepaid airport-parking platforms that cover large European and Asian airports do not cover this one. There is nothing to reserve and nothing to compare.

What follows from that is a practical warning rather than a complaint: any site quoting you a Sharjah airport parking rate has not got it from the operator, because the operator has not published one. Treat those figures the way you would treat a price on a forum post from an unknown year.

When we have checked the rates at the barrier ourselves, they will appear here with the date they were checked. Until then this page says nothing rather than something plausible.

Using it without a price in advance

Take the ticket and keep it somewhere you will not lose it. Payment on exit is the normal arrangement where nothing is prepaid.

Photograph the row and the level. One terminal makes the airport simple and does nothing for your memory of where the car is.

Expect the premium areas to be priced for short stops. That is what they are for; leaving a car there for a week is the expensive way to do it, wherever the rates land.

Allow more time for a pick-up than for a drop-off. Watch the arrivals board rather than the scheduled time — a flight marked as landed means the wait has started, not that it is over.

When not to drive at all

If the trip is a single journey to or from the terminal, parking is a cost you can avoid entirely. The coach runs on a published fare, the taxi rank is outside the door, and a pre-booked car delivers you to it without anything to leave behind.

And if you are collecting somebody, the calculation is different again: a short wait in a premium area is one thing and a long one is another, and you cannot know which you are in for until the board tells you.

Where to next

Renting a car if you are picking one up here rather than leaving one — including what gets charged after you hand it back. Finding your way around the terminal for what is inside the building, and services in the terminal for the practical things.