Ferries from Olbia

Nine piers on a spit of land reached by a causeway, two and a half kilometres from a railway station and five from an airport. Isola Bianca is Sardinia's main passenger gateway and it is laid out like a working port rather than a terminal, which catches out people expecting an airport-style arrivals hall.

The layout

The Isola Bianca passenger terminal sits on the eastern side of the Gulf of Olbia with nine piers. Ships from the Italian mainland berth here; the operators and the seasonal check-in rules are covered on the Olbia guide.

From our timetable the mainland links are Genoa with 13 sailings in and 5 out, Livorno with 5 in and 4 out at about 7 h 30 m, and Civitavecchia with 4.

⚠ The free shuttle is the thing nobody mentions

A free bus runs from the pier into the centre of Olbia — a journey of under 2 km, taking about 10 minutes, leaving roughly every 10 minutes.

Foot passengers regularly walk it or pay for a taxi because the service is not advertised at the ramp. On a hot August afternoon with luggage, the walk along the causeway is considerably less pleasant than it looks on a map.

Onward connections, and their real distances

• Olbia railway station — 2.4 km, in the city centre. About twenty minutes on foot from the port, or take the shuttle and walk from town.
• Olbia Costa Smeralda airport — 5 km.

Note the ordering: the airport is further than the station but far better connected by road. If you are transferring between a flight and a ferry, a taxi is the sensible choice; between a train and a ferry, walking is realistic.

What the port is for

Isola Bianca handles the overnight and long-day crossings from the Italian mainland that bring most vehicles onto Sardinia. It is not an island-hopping port — there is no local network here in the way there is in the Aegean or the Adriatic.

Everything that arrives is either continuing by road into Sardinia or leaving it, which is why the pier layout is built around vehicle marshalling rather than passenger flow.

Timing

Summer weekends and the August changeover are when the vehicle decks fill and the causeway backs up. Outside those weeks the port is quiet and the shuttle is nearly empty.