The kerb outside New Chitose is a no-parking lane, and no rental company hands over a car there. Every one of them drives you to an office in Chitose City instead, and brings you back the same way when you return the vehicle. The airport operator says it plainly: the lane in front of the terminal is a no-parking area, so vehicles shall not be handed over there, and each company sends customers to its business place in Chitose City by bus, the same on the return trip.
That is not worth complaining about. It is worth putting in the plan, because it happens before the driving starts, and in winter the driving has a deadline.
The counter, and the bus
On a domestic arrival the rental counters are on the first floor of the domestic terminal. Times is the most specific about which end of it: its counter is in the Main Building, first floor, on the side of arrival exits 1 to 3, and if you come out at exits 4 or 5 you walk through the terminal and then outside along an external passage of about ninety metres.
The transfer itself is short, and each company publishes its own figure. Nippon says about eight minutes. Toyota says about nine on the return leg. ORIX and Times both say about ten, and ORIX gives the distance as two kilometres.
What none of the four publishes is how often the bus runs. I looked for it on all of their own pages and found no frequency stated anywhere, so plan on waiting rather than on a timetable. Times adds one detail worth knowing: if there is nobody at the counter when you reach it, there is a fixed telephone there to call the branch.
The closing time is the constraint, not the queue
Hours differ by company, and the airport’s own list gives Nippon as 07:00 to 22:00 and Toyota as 08:00 to 20:00.
ORIX is the one that publishes a winter change on its own page: 08:00 to 20:00 from 1 April to 31 October, and 08:00 to 19:00 from 1 November to 31 March. I could not confirm winter hours for the other three from their own pages. If you are booking a late arrival in January, that is a question to put to the company in writing before you pay, not something to discover at the counter.
It compounds with something the season does to you anyway. In a Hokkaido winter the light goes at about four, which is the rule the whole day has to be built around. A flight that lands at three in the afternoon in January is a flight where you queue, ride the bus, sign the forms, and then begin driving in the dark, on a surface you have not met before, in a car you have not driven before.
Arriving on an international flight
The international terminal has a transportation information counter on its first floor, and Toyota says international arrivals are handled at the central airport counter on the first floor. The airport lists sixteen rental companies for domestic flights and twenty for international ones, so the choice is wider than the four compared below — those four are simply the ones whose pricing I have checked.
How far you can actually get on the first day
This is the part that decides the whole itinerary, and it is the part almost nobody publishes as a number. Every distance and driving time below was measured from the airport’s own coordinates through a routing engine over OpenStreetMap road data, in that direction, not estimated from the scale of a map. Eighteen of the thirty places listed are within three hours of the branch. Four are beyond four hours. Three more — Utoro, Rausu and Nemuro — are further still, and fall off the end of this list altogether.
Distances from any point in Hokkaido
Tap a node. The road distance and the driving time from it are measured — a routing engine over OpenStreetMap, not a model standing in for one.
Last updated
2026-09-02
Method: road distance and driving time are the fastest route between each pair, measured 2026-09-02 with the OSRM driving profile over OpenStreetMap. Figures are directional — which way you are going changes them. They are not the corridor distances in the sheets, because a sheet follows the road worth driving: Abashiri to Kushiro is 230 km over Bihoro Pass and round three lakes, and about 151 km if all you want is to arrive. Straight km is great-circle between the published coordinates. Winter time (×1.35) and fuel (7.8 L/100 km) are assumptions, not measurements. Rishiri is absent because the crossing is a ferry. A routing engine’s time is an optimistic one, and why that matters here is its own article.
Two things to hold in mind while reading it. The first is that every one of those times starts at the branch office, not at the aircraft door: the walk to the counter, the queue, the bus and the paperwork all happen before the first kilometre. The second is that these are the fastest routes between two points, which is not always the road worth driving — Abashiri to Kushiro is 151 km if all you want is to arrive, and 230 km if you go over Bihoro Pass and round the lakes, which is the entire reason to go. The full table of 1,122 measured pairs explains where the two disagree and why.
What seven days actually costs
Compact class, seven days, in winter, with four-wheel drive and with both the collision damage waiver and the non-operation charge waiver included — put on the same footing across the four companies, because the headline daily rate is the number that misleads. The working behind these figures, and what each of those waivers actually protects you from, is set out in full in the driving guide.
What to settle before you book
Four things decide whether you drive away at all, and none of them can be fixed at the counter. Your permit has to be the 1949 Geneva format and you have to obtain it before you fly. The excess waiver and the non-operation charge are two separate layers and covering one does not cover the other. Winter tyres come fitted through the snow season, but the dates are not the ones most visitors assume. And an ETC card is not available from every company. Each of those is answered properly in the driving guide rather than repeated here.