Travel to Swiss clinics. The right airport for every address, and a car waiting when you land.

Switzerland's medical and wellness destinations sit in four fairly distinct places. The eastern end of Lake Geneva, around Montreux, Clarens and Vevey. Lake Lucerne, above all at Weggis on the northern shore. Bad Ragaz, in the Rhine valley in the canton of St Gallen. And Zurich itself, where the private hospitals and consulting practices are in the city rather than on a hillside.

Each is served by a different airport, and the difference between the right one and the obvious one is usually an hour of road. Geneva and Zurich are the two large international fields, with full handling, long hours and the aircraft availability to match. Behind them sit smaller airports that put you much closer to the door but come with shorter hours, fewer handling options and, in some cases, limits on the size of aircraft.

Aircraft are arranged for you from operators we work with, and cars in Switzerland through operators we know. Our own cars and chauffeurs are in London and Manchester, which is where a typical trip starts: a car to the private terminal at Luton, Farnborough or Biggin Hill.

The eastern end of Lake Geneva is the best known of the four, and the destination most people mean when they talk about a Swiss clinic stay. Clinique La Prairie is at Clarens, on the lakeside between Montreux and Vevey. Geneva is the airport and the drive is about an hour to an hour and twenty along the A1 and A9. There is no shortcut. The private terminals sit on the far side of the field and a car can normally meet the aircraft there, which takes the edge off the drive that follows. From London the flight is about 1 hour 20 to 1 hour 35. See Geneva's private terminals.

Weggis sits on the northern shore of Lake Lucerne beneath the Rigi, and Chenot Palace Weggis is the address most often given to a driver there. The road route from Zurich runs down the A4 towards Küssnacht, about an hour in normal conditions; the resort itself publishes a figure closer to forty five minutes, and both are true depending on the hour you land. Buochs, the small field near Stans, is closer still, but its runway of about 2,000 metres suits turboprops and light jets, so we check the aircraft and the permissions before offering it.

Bad Ragaz is where the choice of field genuinely changes the day. Grand Resort Bad Ragaz sits in the Rhine valley an hour or so south east of Zurich. St Gallen Altenrhein, near Lake Constance, is about forty five minutes away by road and takes business aircraft on a runway of roughly 1,500 metres. Zurich itself is the simplest of the four: the private hospitals of the Hirslanden group and the consulting practices around the lake and the Bahnhofstrasse are twenty to thirty minutes from the General Aviation Centre at Kloten. The thing worth knowing there is the night curfew, between 23:30 and 06:00, which is applied strictly, so a departure that slips late becomes a departure the following morning.