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Riga International Airport (RIX): arrival & transit guide

What to expect landing at Riga International Airport in Riga, Latvia: the arrival flow, transit rules, and onward transport.

Riga International Airport runs a single terminal building split into two connected sections, one handling flights within the Schengen area and the other handling everything outside it, with the arrivals hall for both on the first floor.

Arriving on a flight from another Schengen country, you go straight to baggage claim with no passport check at all, the same as crossing any other internal Schengen border. Arriving from outside Schengen, you go through passport control first, where EU and EEA passport holders with a biometric passport can use the automated e-gates, and everyone else uses a staffed lane; whether your own passport also needs a visa for that stay depends on the requirement above, since Latvia follows the shared Schengen visa list rather than its own separate one.

Connecting through Riga entirely within the Schengen area generally means no second passport check. A connection from a non-Schengen flight onward into the Schengen area, or the reverse, does require passing through immigration at a transit corridor before reaching the next gate, so build real time into that kind of connection rather than treating it as airside throughout.

Outside the terminal, a bus route and taxis both run the short trip into central Riga.

All passports for Latvia