Negotiating the traffic at Maastricht-Aachen Airport

Buying a $6 million ­Brueghel at this month’s art fair in Maastricht is easy. The hard part: negotiating the traffic at Aachen Airport.

The Dutch city of Maastricht, just next to the Belgian border, plays host each year to the Davos of the art world, the European Fine Arts Fair. The annual March show, often simply called Tefaf, sells about $1 billion worth of ­museum-quality art and antiquities, including work by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Van Gogh. Art world V.I.P.’s like Ari Kopelman, Henry Kravitz, and Ronald Lauder pop into town for the black-tie collectors’ preview or the ­opening-night champagne fest, but there’s not a great deal else to do in the sleepy ancient hamlet, so they slip away pretty fast.

All those private jets test the limits of tiny Maastricht Aachen Airport, which typically sees about 350,000 passengers a year (compared with nearby Amsterdam Schiphol’s 56 million). Last year, 150 private planes landed on the town’s single airstrip in the fair’s first two days, according to airport spokesman Mark Keulers; and Maastricht-Aachen managers expect more for 2008.

Read the rest of the article: Conde Nast Portfolio.com, 5 March 2008

Sueli’s comment: “There’s not a great deal else to do in the sleepy ancient hamlet”… Is this still the image of Maastricht in the outside world?