I can confirm that taking the bus from Lausanne airport to the city is very easy. It is the closest bus stop to a small airport that I have seen (probably a minute walk).
Just make sure you take the right bus. One of them is considerably faster than the other, which we experienced during the Lausanne meet-up where we did a bus race. The bus that leaves first is not necessarily the first one to arrive. 
I fly there quite often. Landing for my A36 is €15 and it’s €9 a night to park outside.
In my first call to LFLI I include “quelle piste SVP?”.
Geneva is always helpful. Inbound you can cancel IFR below 8,000 ft or do an ILS and break off if they’re not too busy. Join via ‘R’ for rw 12 or straight-in if no one’s around. Outbound follow procedure that Highfly uploaded, although last time they had me climb in the overhead before routing north over LSGG. Achim’s autorouter knows the LSGG procedure and will produce an IFR departure!
Here’s a link to their AIP page: http://d.pr/f/HBUi
Oh, and there’s a Eurocar office just down the road. You might be able to persuade them to leave the car at LFLI.
I can confirm that taking the bus from Lausanne airport to the city is very easy. It is the closest bus stop to a small airport that I have seen (probably a minute walk). You can hire a car from the city and go back to take your luggage if you don’t want to carry it with you.
Morgan,
Regarding AVGAS, the machine only accepts TOTAL cards, but if you don’t have one you just talk to the person in the office and they use their TOTAL card and then you pay them. A non-issue, really.
The office/airport is attended until sunset.
noted on the Calvi parking – will take care!
I would absolutely refuse to park on that surface, even if you shut down on tarmac and push your plane there by hand, because anybody else parking there will be doing so under power and will cover your plane in the stuff
They have plenty of tarmac but when we went there (EuroGA fly-in Sep 2014) they seemed to have a policy of allowing only turboprops and twins to park on the tarmac. It should be possible to establish if there is an extra charge for that. At many airports, to get hard surface you have to go via the handling agent (a nice scam).
Lausanne has an easy bus to the city and everything is there. I would not worry about a lack of car hire at the airport. Even Le Touquet “has” car hire but most days there is nobody there…
HighFly – that’s perfect. Thank you ever so much
Thanks all for your comments.
Peter – I’ve read your trip report a couple of times now (very interesting, thx!) and I did get in contact with Lausanne but they weren’t willing to sort out car rental other than direct me into the town centre. noted on the Calvi parking – will take care!
Tomjinx / Aeroplus – thanks for the info. So presumably I’ll get by with English on the radio. I’ll do a bit more research on the IFR departures.
Does Annemasse have peculiar timings with AVGAS availability? OK to pay with debit/credit cards?
What a timely question – I just flew there for the first time last week (twice). I used French one time and English the other — didn’t seem to be a problem.
The first time I landed there, as I didn’t know what runway was in use, I announced I was joining for runway 12 but then the lady in the office came on the frequency and said to use runway 30. The second time there were quite a few planes in the pattern so it was easy to figure out what runway was in use; however, they were all using French (local flying club). So, I would suggest learning the words for “12” and “30” in French just so you can recognize them.
I picked up the IFR departure procedure “flyer” in the office…here it is. I really wish these kinds of things were published more openly for airports around Europe. So many of these procedures are tribal knowledge!
I’ll post the landing fees later.
The nice thing about Annemasse is that you can use the Geneva ILS with a breakout to the left to join final of Annemasse. Very nice little French airport. Active flying community there.
