The flight from Biggin Hill to Le Touquet takes twenty-seven minutes. The drive from south London to Biggin Hill takes forty. The drive from Le Touquet airfield to the centre of town takes seven. By eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning you are sitting at a café on Rue de Saint-Jean drinking a coffee and reading a folded copy of Le Figaro, and the only sign that you started your day at home in London is a faintly damp Barbour you have not yet hung over the back of a chair.
This is the Channel weekend the French have been doing in the other direction for a century: their grandparents took the train from Paris to Le Touquet because the Belle Époque resort was the smartest weekend the country had to offer. The British version, where you fly across in a small aircraft, treat the town as one long lunch, and are home in time for dinner with your own kids, has become surprisingly easy.
The day-trip version, four people on a turboprop, lands somewhere between £2,800 and £3,900 all in. The weekend version, with a night at the Westminster and a Sunday morning oyster run to Étaples, comes out around £4,500 to £6,000 for the same four. Either way you are home in the same week.
The Route, At Ground Level
The short answer to "where do I fly from": Biggin Hill (EGKB), Lydd (EGMD), or Rochester (EGTO). All three reach Le Touquet (LFAT) in under half an hour.
Biggin Hill is the smartest of the three. The FBO is full-service, customs and Border Force run from the building, the lounge has decent coffee. The downside is that the airfield is busy and slots on summer Saturday mornings need to be booked a week or two ahead.
Lydd is the closest to Le Touquet, about fifteen minutes airborne. The airfield is small and friendly. LyddAir runs a scheduled service to Le Touquet on some days which is a useful baseline for what an empty-leg charter from there should cost.
Rochester is the cheapest option and a quietly excellent choice for the southeast London crowd, but it is a smaller field with less amenity. The flight is twenty-eight minutes instead of fifteen.
The aircraft we tend to quote for this run, in the order we usually offer them:
- A Cessna 421 (six seats, cabin-class twin, the everyday workhorse for this kind of hop)
- A Piper Meridian (six seats, single turboprop, the value option for four people)
- A Pilatus PC-12 (up to eight seats, the choice if you want a cabin you can stand up in and a slightly faster crossing)
- A King Air B200 (seven seats, the comfortable middle ground if you are carrying golf clubs or bicycles)
All of these can use Le Touquet's runway without complication. The airfield sits at the south end of the town. The handler is on the apron when you land, the customs paperwork takes five minutes inside the small terminal, and you are in a car ten minutes after the wheels touch.
Lunch At Pérard
There is one restaurant in Le Touquet that anchors the trip. It is called Pérard. It is on Rue de Metz in the middle of town. It has been there for fifty years and the building has not noticeably been updated, which is the point.
Serge Pérard invented his Soupe de Poissons in the 1960s. It is the dish the restaurant is famous for and the one you should order. A copper pot of fish broth arrives at the table with three small bowls: croutons, a thick rouille (the saffron-and-garlic mayonnaise), and grated Gruyère. You spoon a little of each into your bowl, ladle the broth over, and the small ceremony of it is part of the meal. The soup is dark, intensely savoury, and tastes of forty different things. There is a reason this restaurant has been selling exactly this dish for half a century.
What else to order:
- A dozen oysters from the local Bouchot beds, or six if you are starting with the soup
- The whole grilled fish of the day (sea bass, sole, or John Dory depending on the morning's landing)
- The warm oysters with champagne sabayon if it is on the day's menu (a richer dish, surprisingly good)
- A glass of Sancerre or Picpoul, served properly cold
A long lunch at Pérard for four with wine lands around €280 to €340. The restaurant is open seven days a week, 12pm to 2.30pm and again 7pm to 9.30pm (10.30pm on Fridays and Saturdays). Saturday lunch is busy. Book at least a few days ahead.
The shop attached to the restaurant sells the soup in jars to take home. Buy two. Friends will ask where you got them.
A Walk In The Forêt Du Touquet
Lunch will run two hours. After it you need a walk.
The Forêt du Touquet is several hundred hectares of pine and birch planted in the late nineteenth century, threaded with marked footpaths and cycle tracks. The entrance closest to the town centre is at the end of Avenue du Verger, ten minutes' walk from Pérard. From there you can do a loop of about three kilometres, with a side path to the Canche estuary if you have time. Bring trainers; the paths are sand-and-pine-needle, not pavement.
If you have an hour and a half rather than thirty minutes, walk the longer loop towards the Pointe du Touquet at the mouth of the Canche. On a clear day you can see Étaples across the estuary and, with luck and patience, the small population of harbour seals that live on the sandbanks. Bring binoculars if you take this seriously.
The casino sits at the eastern edge of the forest. The Casino de la Forêt is a 1907 Belle Époque building, and famously the place that gave Ian Fleming the title of Casino Royale while he was working on the early Bond novels. You do not need to go inside. The exterior alone is worth the walk past on the way back to town.
Oysters At Étaples (If You Have An Extra Hour)
This is the optional extension that turns the day from very nice into the best day. Étaples-sur-Mer is fifteen minutes by taxi from Le Touquet, on the other side of the Canche estuary. It is a working fishing port. The smell at the quayside is honest. The fish stalls along the Boulevard de l'Impératrice sell that morning's catch from polystyrene boxes and the prices are roughly half what you would pay across the estuary.
The traditional place to eat oysters on the quay is Aux Pêcheurs d'Étaples, a long-established fish restaurant attached to the cooperative auction house. Sit at the upstairs terrace if the weather is good. Order a dozen Bouchot oysters from the bay, a half-bottle of Muscadet sur lie, and a plate of grey shrimps with brown bread and butter. The whole thing for two will come in under €60.
If the timing works (Saturday market hours are typically 8am to 1pm), the Étaples Saturday market on the quayside is also a useful detour for picking up cheese, sea-salt caramels, or that morning's brown shrimps to take home in an ice-pack.
To get to Étaples from central Le Touquet, taxi is the simplest option (around €20 to €25 one-way). The slightly more atmospheric way is to take the foot-passenger ferry across the Canche from the southern end of Le Touquet's seafront. This runs in summer only and the schedule is more honoured in the breach than the observance. Confirm with your taxi driver before you commit.
A Drink At Westminster, Then Back To The Aircraft
If you want one last thing before you fly back, the bar at the Hôtel Barrière Le Westminster is the unimprovable answer. The Westminster is the grand interwar hotel at the corner of Rue de Paris and Avenue du Verger. The bar is dark wood, low lighting, a piano in the corner. The cocktails are competent without being precious. A glass of champagne is in the high teens.
Sit there for half an hour. Pay the bill. Take a five-minute taxi back to the airfield. The crew will be on the apron when you arrive, the aircraft will be fuelled and pre-flighted, the door open. From the moment you climb the stairs to the moment you land at Biggin Hill is around forty minutes including taxi time.
The Saturday, Block By Block
A realistic version of the day, for four people on a turboprop:
- 08:30 Leave the house in London
- 09:15 Arrive at Biggin Hill FBO, hand over the car, walk through the lounge
- 09:30 Wheels up
- 09:57 Wheels down at Le Touquet
- 10:10 Through customs, in a taxi
- 10:25 Coffee at a café on Rue de Saint-Jean
- 12:30 Lunch at Pérard begins
- 14:30 Walk into the Forêt du Touquet
- 16:00 Taxi to Étaples (or skip this and stay in town)
- 16:30 Oysters and Muscadet at Aux Pêcheurs d'Étaples
- 17:30 Taxi back via the Westminster for a final drink
- 18:30 Taxi to the airfield
- 18:45 Wheels up from Le Touquet
- 19:15 Wheels down at Biggin Hill
- 19:55 Home for dinner
If you skip Étaples, you can move the return flight forward by ninety minutes and be home by 18:30. If you want to overnight, the Westminster is the obvious choice; the Manoir Hôtel on the inland edge of the town is the smaller, more discreet alternative.
What It Actually Costs
For four people on a turboprop day-return, indicative pricing as of mid-2026:
- Aircraft charter (Cessna 421 or Piper Meridian, round-trip): £2,000 to £2,800
- Landing and handling at Le Touquet: £200 to £350
- Taxis (four short trips): around £80 total
- Lunch at Pérard, four people with wine: €280 to €340
- Oysters at Étaples for two: €40 to €60
- Drinks at the Westminster: €60 to €90
Total: roughly £2,800 to £3,900, or £700 to £980 per person.
Compare that to four British Airways business-class day-returns to Paris CDG (around £550 each, plus a connection back to London, plus a four-hour total travel time each way). The light aircraft option is faster, more enjoyable, and not meaningfully more expensive. For three or four people travelling together it is often the cheaper of the two.
The weekend version, with a night at the Westminster and the same itinerary stretched over two days, lands around £4,500 to £6,000 for four.
When Not To Do It
The Channel is not always kind. The Le Touquet day-trip is a fair-weather plan.
Things to be aware of:
- November to March is hard. Short daylight, low cloud, frequent wind off the Channel. The aircraft can fly, but the day is less pleasant. Save it for April through October.
- Strong north winds make the crossing bumpy on a small turboprop. Less of an issue on the PC-12 or King Air. The captain will tell you honestly whether it is worth it.
- August. The town is full of French families and the restaurants are packed. The flight in is fine; the lunch is more stressful. June, September, and the first half of October are quieter and the weather is often better.
- Sunday return. The airfield handles fewer slots on Sundays and the customs office hours are shorter. Confirm with the operator before booking a Sunday-evening return.
If the weather is genuinely off, a good operator will tell you the day before and offer to move the flight by 24 hours. That is the relationship you should have with whoever flies you. Pressure to fly in marginal weather is not professional. The operators we work with do not do it.
When You're Ready To Go
The Le Touquet day-trip is the one that sells the next one. People who do this once tend to start asking about Calvi the Saturday after next, then Formentera in July, then Megève in February. The Channel hop is the gateway flight.
If you want a quote for this trip on a specific Saturday, message us with the date and group size. We send back three options across operators we know, with the costs broken out and a recommended departure airfield based on where you live in London. It is the most short-hop-friendly route we run and the answers are usually straightforward. Browse the rest of the Short Hops series if you want to see what else this kind of flight makes possible.
Message us on WhatsApp or Telegram. Tell us the date, the number of you, and any flex on timing. We will handle the rest.