Landing at Kotoka International Airport

What to have in your hand before the doors open

Have your passport, your completed arrival card, your yellow fever certificate and the full address of where you are staying within reach before the cabin doors open. Everything that goes wrong at Kotoka on arrival goes wrong because something is buried in a checked bag or at the bottom of a rucksack.

Cabin crew hand out the arrival card in the last hour of the flight on most carriers. Fill it in while you are still seated, in block capitals, using the actual street address or hotel name of your first night. "Accra" on its own tends to get handed back to you at the desk.

Your yellow fever certificate is the one document people forget, because it lives in a different wallet from the passport. Ghana asks for it, and the health desk sits before immigration, not after, so there is no talking your way past it. If you are unsure what yours needs to show, read our guide to the yellow fever certificate for Ghana before you fly.

Put a pen in your pocket too. There are rarely enough of them in the hall.

Off the plane and through the health desk

You will walk off the aircraft into a corridor, follow the signs marked Arrivals, and reach a health screening point before you reach passport control. International flights land at Terminal 3, which is the large modern terminal; domestic flights to Kumasi, Tamale and Takoradi use Terminal 1 and Terminal 2, which matters only if you have a connecting hop.

Kotoka is a single-corridor arrival in the sense that there are no branching decisions to make. You are not going to take a wrong turn. Follow the crowd from your flight and read the overhead signs.

At the health desk, an officer checks your yellow fever card and sometimes takes a temperature reading. It is quick. Hand over the card open at the correct page rather than the whole booklet, and it is quicker still.

If you have young children, this is the first point where the queue bunches. Let them stretch their legs here rather than in the immigration line, where the ropes are tighter and the wait is longer.

Immigration: which queue to join, and the biometrics

Join the queue that matches your passport, not your ancestry. Ghanaian passport holders and ECOWAS nationals use one set of desks; everyone else, including diaspora travellers on British, American, Canadian or other passports, uses the foreign nationals desks, even on a return visit to family.

People get this wrong constantly and lose twenty minutes being redirected. If you hold two passports, the queue is decided by the one you are entering on, which should be the one carrying your Ghana visa or your right of entry.

At the desk the officer takes your fingerprints on a scanner and photographs you at the booth. Take off hats and glasses before you get there. The scanner reads dry hands poorly, so if yours are dry from the flight, breathe on them or rub them together rather than pressing harder.

Expect to be asked where you are staying and how long you are staying. Answer plainly with the address on your arrival card. This is a routine question, not a challenge, and short factual answers move you through fastest.

Baggage reclaim and the porters

Decide whether you want a porter before anyone takes hold of your trolley, and say so clearly. Porters at Kotoka are legitimate and often genuinely useful, but the moment of confusion is what causes the awkwardness afterwards, when a bag has been carried a hundred metres you did not ask for.

The belts are signposted by flight number. Bags from a full widebody take a while to appear, so there is no advantage in crowding the belt. Stand back where you can see, and step in when yours comes round.

If you do want help, agree it plainly: "Yes, please take these two to the exit." If you do not, "No thank you, I have it" said once and warmly is enough. Ghanaian courtesy runs both ways, and a polite refusal is not an offence.

If you use a porter, tipping is normal and is done at the point where they stop, not at the kerb. Have small cedi notes for this, which is one reason to draw cash before you leave the baggage area rather than after.

Customs and the arrivals hall

Most arrivals walk through the green channel without being stopped, but your bags may be put through a scanner on the way out, and that is normal rather than a sign of suspicion. Declare anything genuinely commercial: quantities of electronics, goods clearly for resale, or large amounts of cash.

The rule that catches diaspora travellers is the family shopping run. A suitcase of gifts for relatives is fine. Forty identical phone cases is trade, and will be treated as trade.

Past customs you push through a set of doors into the arrivals hall, and the noise changes immediately. There is a crowd behind a barrier, there are name boards, there are people calling out, and after a long flight it can feel like a lot at once.

Stop just past the doors, to one side, and take thirty seconds. Nothing in the hall requires you to move quickly, and standing still while you find your bearings is far better than being walked somewhere by someone confident.

Where drivers actually wait, and the taxi touts

Arrange to meet your driver inside the arrivals hall, at a named fixed point, rather than at the kerb. The kerb outside Terminal 3 is a working traffic lane with marshals moving cars along, so a driver waiting there is a driver who has to keep circling, and you end up standing outside with luggage looking for a number plate.

A good pickup arrangement has four parts: the driver's name, the driver's phone number, your name printed on a board, and a meeting point you both named in advance. Send a message when you land and again when you clear customs.

You will also be approached in the hall by men offering taxis. Most are simply hustling for work rather than trying to cheat you, but the price is negotiated on their terms while you are tired and have no local reference point for what the run should cost.

"No thank you, I have a driver" while continuing to walk is the whole technique. Say it once, keep your tone friendly, do not stop to explain. Stopping to explain is what invites the second and third approach.

Tired, jet-lagged and standing at a kerb is the worst possible position from which to negotiate a fare.

SIM cards and cash: what to do at the airport and what to leave

Buy a small amount of cash at the airport and a local SIM in town, unless you need to be reachable immediately. The airport is a convenient place to solve a problem and a poor place to change large sums, because airport rates are rarely the best rates you will see all trip.

Ghana requires SIM cards to be registered against the Ghana Card or, for visitors, a passport, and registration is done properly rather than informally. Airport desks can do it, but queues are long after a bank of flights lands, and a dealer shop in town on your second morning is usually calmer and better stocked. If you want mobile data the moment you land, an eSIM bought before you fly sidesteps the question entirely.

For money, draw enough cedis at an airport ATM to cover a fare, a tip and a first day, then change or withdraw the rest in Accra. Tell your bank you are travelling so the card is not blocked at the worst moment, and take a second card kept somewhere separate.

Rates and fees move constantly, so check what your own bank charges for a foreign withdrawal before you rely on it.

The drive: Accra, East Legon and Kasoa, honestly

Kotoka sits inside Accra, so the drive to a central hotel is short in distance and entirely dependent on the hour. East Legon is typically twenty to forty minutes. Central Accra is similar. Kasoa, west of the city, is commonly an hour and a half to two hours, and can be considerably more in Friday evening traffic.

Those are honest ranges rather than promises. Accra traffic does not degrade gently; it goes from moving to stationary at predictable pinch points, and the Kasoa road in particular is a different road at 7am than at 11pm.

If you are heading somewhere far after a night flight, eat something at the airport first. Arriving hungry into a two-hour crawl is a miserable start to a trip that has otherwise gone well. Our guide to getting around Ghana covers what happens after the first day, once you are moving around on your own.

Late arrivals, elderly parents, small children and missing bags

Late-night arrivals are normal at Kotoka and not something to fear, but they remove your margin for error, so the pickup has to be arranged in advance rather than solved on the pavement. Many long-haul flights from Europe and North America land in the late evening or the small hours, and the hall thins out fast afterwards.

If you are travelling with elderly parents or someone who cannot stand in a queue, request wheelchair or mobility assistance from your airline when you book, and confirm it again a day or two before departure. It is the airline's service, arranged at the departure airport, and it follows you through the aircraft door to the arrivals hall. Asking on the day rarely works.

With small children, send one adult ahead to the immigration desk with the passports while the other holds the pushchair and the bags. Splitting the family across two queues is what turns a twenty-minute wait into an hour.

If a bag does not arrive, do not leave the baggage area. Find the airline's handling desk before customs, file a property irregularity report, and get the reference number in writing along with a Ghanaian phone number they can call. Photograph the report and your baggage tag. Delayed bags very often turn up on the next rotation of the same flight, but only if the report exists. If this is your first trip home in years, our piece on what a first trip back to Ghana actually feels like covers the wider adjustment.

How we handle Kotoka pickups

Ghana Travel & Tour meets arrivals at Kotoka every week, so a pickup with us is a named driver, a phone number sent to you before you fly, a board with your name on it and a meeting point inside the hall rather than at the kerb. We track the flight, so a delay or an early landing does not leave anyone circling.

We also carry on to Kasoa, East Legon and further afield, and we will tell you plainly what the traffic is likely to do at your landing time. See airport pickups and car hire with a driver. Quotes are itemised and come from a named trip manager you can reply to directly.

Questions people ask