Getting around GYE
José Joaquín de Olmedo sits inside Guayaquil’s own northern urban perimeter, run by TAGSA — a Corporación América Airports subsidiary — under a concession that began on 27 February 2004 and runs to 27 July 2031. When IATA and ICAO consultants reviewed the rebuild, they recommended folding the international and domestic terminals into one two-storey building rather than keeping them apart; that single terminal opened on 27 July 2006 and grew to roughly 60,000 square metres after a 2014 expansion. The airport has picked up Skytrax’s Best Regional Airport in South America title repeatedly (2011 through 2014) plus a 4-star Skytrax certification in 2018, and ACI kept naming it Best Airport in Latin America & the Caribbean for its passenger bracket as recently as 2024. In 2025 the terminal carried 2,285,729 international passengers — over a third of Ecuador’s entire international traffic — while its domestic side received 1,025,040 passengers and sent out 812,666 more to Quito, Cuenca, Baltra and San Cristóbal.
