I see that there’s a nice new regional airport at Everett, Washington. I can catch a nonstop flight from San Jose to Everett if I want, thereby skipping Seatac and all the traffic of Seattle.
But try as I might, I can’t Google up any information about a car rental facility or car rental shuttles at Paine.
Has anyone been there yet and can fill me in on this? If the only way to rent a car is to take a taxi from Paine Airfield to Everett to hunt up Hertz then I’m not sure this airport is for me.
The airport has been there for a long time but it just opened for commercial flights yesterday. There are some rental places near, but I’m pretty sure nothing is exactly at the airport like a normal airport.
When I google I see a few that are close like on airport road and one on highway 99 (Enterprise).
If you go to Google Maps and select Paine Field, then search locally for Car Rental, you’ll see a number of places fairly close, but not right in the airport. They’re mostly on Evergreen Way to the east, or some further south. There’s an Alamo, a Budget and an Enterprise, and some non-chain places too. Maybe they have shuttles or pickup services. There is one called Tipoa that is just outside the airport on Airport Road near 100th St SW.
Based on some other small airports, I suspect there are shuttle buses to the rental locations.
Apparently, they’re still working on getting car rental companies. The website says, “We are working with several national car rental companies to ensure ease of transport to and from the terminal. Please check back here for updates.”
Interesting. Trying to take some overflow from Sea-Tac?
Two of my most memorable flights ever were from Paine Field.
Not so much right now - 2 gates, 24 daily flights. SeaTac has 80 gates, 600 flights.
My ignorance is fought… I always thought Boeing owned Paine Field as its private corporation owned test flight field.
Ah, thank you for rooting that out. I couldn’t find anything that specific.
Paine Field was historically a Boeing private field, but just (as in yesterday) opened for commercial flights. There only a few so far, but it looks like a great little airport and assuming they get the car rental thing sorted out, I’ll be happy to fly there and avoid the Seatac crowds.
My understanding is that SeaTac is rather overcrowded, though, and a second airport in the area would be a great help in that. That said, Paine Field is surrounded by residents who really didn’t want commercial service there in the first place, and who would probably fight a significant expansion.
Still, having Paine field there would have been a huge help when I went to visit my aunt in Lynwood last summer. Getting from SeaTac (south of downtown) to anywhere north of the city is a tremendous hassle.
Nope, owned by the city of Everett. Boeing owns some land adjacent to the airport just across the highway from the factory. I had to spend too much time out there when I worked on the then new 777 program.
I found the contact / info email to Paine Field and sent them a query regarding car rentals and shuttles. Hopefully when we fly up there this October we’ll be able to go through Paine.
Hey, they answered back already.
“Thank you very much for the congratulations, we’re thrilled to be operating at Paine Field. Off-site rental car companies will be greeting passengers with a shuttle in the ground transportation lot. Available are: Alamo, Avis, Budget, Enterprise, National.”
Cool!
I love Paine Field and took flying lessons out of there. On one taxi, me in my little Cessna 150, I was on the taxiway squashed (figuratively) behind a 747 and in front of a 777. The tower gave me just as much respect as the big boys and even gave me an extra minute to wait for turbulence to die down :D. I suspect the 777 wasn’t bothered by my turbulence.
Uber/Lyft are very very easily accessed up by Paine Field. I don’t know about taxi situation. And the cost of an Uber to downtown Seattle should be about the same as Sea-Tac.
My first lessons, and my first solo, were at Renton.
As long as your call sign wasn’t “Cessna 150 Heavy”.
Article today about this in the Seattle Times.
The bar sounds great!
Bumping up my thread to report that I’ve booked our tickets to fly to Paine Field in Everett this October. Enterprise’s website claims to have the same makes of cars near Paine Field that they do at Seatac, but I’ll wait to see if that claim is true - Google’s street view of the Enterprise rental place shows a quite small operation.
But I’m just happy we don’t have to deal with Seattle traffic during our vacation.
Enterprise’ll send your requested car type from the “main regional office” in the area to Paine Field. Paine Field, being a “neighborhood” branch, won’t have a lot of extra cars, if any, hanging around to choose from if you don’t like what you get.
A bonus of this arrangement is when you return the car to another location within the area, you probably won’t get a one-way dropoff charge since all the cars “belong” to the regional office. I had to do this when my car recently died. I picked up the car at the neighborhood location near my home and dropped it off at a neighborhood location near the car dealership 50 miles away after I bought the car. No additional charge for not returning it to the originating location.
Bumping up my old thread once more to report on my experience at Paine Field.
It was a breeze! The terminal is tiny, and you’re off the plane and out into the shuttle area in about five minutes.
The car rental situation is: they have a parking lot-like area right next to the terminal which has been dedicated to shuttles. Clearly-marked small shuttles arrive and drive you to nearby car rental locations in Everett. The wait for the shuttle was about five minutes, and the drive from the airport to Enterprise took about five to ten minutes. The Everett Enterprise branch did have available the type of car we requested online when we booked.
The only drawback: Paine Field’s shuttle parking area has no shelter and no place to sit down. If it was raining, this would be a problem.
But I’ll never fly into Seatac again.