Best and Worst Airports

[popcorn]

Transferred at Moscow once. Took over an hour for about 50 people to go through security. It was the most shamelessly discoordinated mess. The staff made no effort to form people into a queue and just bolted them into a weird funnel shape on at random points. Signs that led to nowhere. Open security lanes that had were marked closed that the staff seemed surprised no one was using. I'm honestly not sure I wasn't supposed to be bribing people.

[flotemysost]

Wellington has some entirely predictable, but quite fun, LOTR stuff dangling from the ceiling:





The last one is quite horrifying, I'll admit. It's a decent airport though.

Agree that Luton is a cold, leaky shithole. Staff at the desk were pretty rude when grilling me about why I was flying to Ibiza via Italy (because it was about a fifth of the price), then had to wait to board the plane (which was nearly two hours late, but I guess that's on the airline) in what was essentially a flooded cupboard.

[Ferris]

Transferred at Moscow once. Took over an hour for about 50 people to go through security. It was the most shamelessly discoordinated mess. The staff made no effort to form people into a queue and just bolted them into a weird funnel shape on at random points. Signs that led to nowhere. Open security lanes that had were marked closed that the staff seemed surprised no one was using. I'm honestly not sure I wasn't supposed to be bribing people.

You were absolutely supposed to bribe people. I had to bribe my way through St Petersburg because I didn't have a flight out of Russia (I was leaving by coach) so I had to give the border guard money to "book a flight" for me. Not sure what flight he was going to get me for 30quid in roubles but ok.

[seepage]

Wellington has some entirely predictable, but quite fun, LOTR stuff dangling from the ceiling:

I always thought they were advertising a branch of Games Workshop beyond security.

[BlodwynPig]

Frankfurt Hahn has to be up there as one of the shitter liar name airports. It's a long bus ride away.

Where else.. Dusseldorf Weeze... fucking ages away. Paris Beauvais? Wank, not even to avoid CDG airport.

Oslo has a couple that are miles out, I think.

The main Oslo one is on the coast. Oslo is not on the coast. Nice bleak bus journey though to the village of Oslo.

[BlodwynPig]

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/06/which-airports-are-farthest-from-city.html?m=1

My early days of flying were to some of those furthest from city airports (Vasteras was fun - shed in wilderness). I thought it was normal. Stansted is probably the furthest away in the UK?

[BlodwynPig]

You were absolutely supposed to bribe people. I had to bribe my way through St Petersburg because I didn't have a flight out of Russia (I was leaving by coach) so I had to give the border guard money to "book a flight" for me. Not sure what flight he was going to get me for 30quid in roubles but ok.

I've told the story on here about my post-wedding mad taxi journey to the airport, but I found the staff inside including the policemen to be friendly, funny and "on my side" - i.e., when the mad taxi driver came chasing my new wife through security in the airport demanding his 600 pound-equivalent fare.

[Bogbrainedmurphy]

Berlin-Schonefeld is awful.

hope this helps.

Agreed, absolute dross and a bitch to get to and from.

Missing the coach connection to "Paris" Beauvais and thinking "be reet, we'll just get a taxi instead" is also not recommended AT ALL.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

why I was flying to Ibiza via Italy

How did they know/need to know? Surely it just looked like you were flying to Italy.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Ah, Frankfurt-Hahn. Spent a lovely evening (and early morning) there waiting to kick off my old band's European tour because the driver and van we'd enlisted had gone to Frankfurt International instead (not unreasonably), then gone home, and had to be coaxed away from his dinner by the promoter to embark on another three-hour round trip to pick us up at our flugenshed instead.

Gave us lots of time to enjoy the amenities, which consisted of absolutely nothing apart from a payphone. Then the airport closed (at 11pm) and we were papped out on to the road. And then it started to rain. So we pressed ourselves back up against the glass frontage trying to use a six-inch ledge as shelter from the weather, while our drummer moaned that his cymbal cases weren't waterproof.

Rock'n'roll!!!

Haha fucking hell, almost serenely incompetent.

[BlodwynPig]

With FlyBMI going into administration today and Brexit, we may not need airports in the near future in the UK.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

With FlyBMI going into administration today and Brexit, we may not need airports in the near future in the UK.

They just spent quite a lot advertising a new route from Leeds Bradford to Munich. £100 a ticket by the look of it, which thankfully put me off buying one.

[mothman]

I quite liked BWI - Baltimore Washington International. I went through there on a business trip once (or rather twice, really) and it's rather small and low-key; I presume Dulles gets all the heavy traffic.

Athens and Rome Fuimicino were predictably nightmarish. Madrid was surprisingly OK, and their executive lounge is a) huge, b) quiet, and c) very well catered.

[flotemysost]

How did they know/need to know? Surely it just looked like you were flying to Italy.

I think they must've asked what my final destination was - there were some weather-related delays that day so maybe they were checking to see if anyone had a changeover, if they were expecting the flight to be late (which it was), so that's fair enough, but the woman I spoke to had an unnecessarily weird/unfriendly tone.

Also, I once saw someone attempt to kidnap a child at Stansted, but I don't think that was Stansted's fault.

[hamfist]

Yeah Hahn can get to fuck. Drove hours to get there from Interlaken, check in was closing but my pal Alex from Frankfurt was still looking for a parking space so I tried to keep check in open and they got rather shirty with me. Still, Alex made it and we got our flight to Finland ok.

Cologne-Bonn has a nice announcement chime. Geneva's sounds like the first few notes of ,how much is that doggy in the window'. But still, this Zürich fanboi rates their announcement chime best : a deep grandfather clock ,ding dooooooong'

Las Vegas used to have travelator announcements done by celebrities. ,,Hi, this us Zsa Zsa. Take care as you leave the moving walkway".

[Ferris]

I quite liked BWI - Baltimore Washington International. I went through there on a business trip once (or rather twice, really) and it's rather small and low-key; I presume Dulles gets all the heavy traffic.

Dulles does, and it is a shithole.

[EbbyVale]

Then there's the Portland, Oregon airport, which has so little going on that its residents fetishized its carpet to the point of its being in Wikipedia. 

Vancouver airport has cool art.

[kngen]

Dulles does, and it is a shithole.

And fucking impossible to get to. It's the capital of the free world (I suppose), and yet public transport links involve getting two Metros and then a bus, or an Uber in Beltway traffic, which is more stress than is healthy for me at this point in my life. Last time I was there, they were slapping themselves on the back for getting their direct rail link to Union Station halfway completed - and that's taken them about 10 years.

Plus those stupid, stupid pneumamtic people mover things that take you from terminal to terminal. Being phased out, thankfully ... but not completely!

[Twed]

Oh my fucking Christ FUCK DULLES

[Ferris]

Oh my fucking Christ FUCK DULLES

When we were there, the TSA agents literally threw cases at some poor chap who didn't speak English to make him leave the security gate. Not figuratively, actually picked his cases up and threw a few past the gate, and the last one at him when he walked forward to retrieve them.

They were absolutely baffled by my wife being Canadian but me using my British passport. They kept calling me by my middle name (and occasionally my last name) and asked me why I filled in one form per family unit (you know, as requested by the form). This is a form with three boxes on it (name, citizenship, anything to declare) and they were fucking useless at it. They must look at it all day.

That's before you get on to the metro transit that would embarrass a failed soviet satellite state.

Fuck Dulles airport, for real tho.

[Twed]

Fuck DCA too. Also fuck going to DC in general.

[Ferris]

Fuck DCA too. Also fuck going to DC in general.

DC was great (walkable, nice restaurants and attractions etc etc), but the airport is awful.

[Dex Sawash]

Best airports to land at

Phoenix- looks like maybe you are just going to land on the highway in the  middle of town. Mesas.

San Francisco- usually fly down the bay from San Jose toward SFO and there's always a bunch of other planes around you and weird salt ponds to look at.

Denver- there's no sign of a fucking terminal anywhere once you land due to low brown hills

[Twed]

DC was great (walkable, nice restaurants and attractions etc etc), but the airport is awful.

Everything is up a hill though.

It's fine I'm sure, it's just that every time I've been it's been on work conferences with uncultured types who eat like children so I either had to make excuses to sneak out on my own or eat at Chipotle. One of the times I snuck out I got food poisoning (rare for me, my belly is made of lead).

Did manage to snag breakfast at Bethesda Bagels most days though. Yes to that.

Getting to airports is an absolute nightmare journey that has me carsick every time. How do people drive in DC? That's fucking nuts.

[BlodwynPig]

Best airports to land at

Phoenix- looks like maybe you are just going to land on the highway in the  middle of town. Mesas.

San Francisco- usually fly down the bay from San Jose toward SFO and there's always a bunch of other planes around you and weird salt ponds to look at.

Denver- there's no sign of a fucking terminal anywhere once you land due to low brown hills

Flying into and out of Denver is terrifying. Fucking turbulence.

[Attila]

Ditto on the Dulles hate -- when I was still married to my ex, Dulles was my closest international airport (once I got away from him and moved back home, I split my travel hubs between Philadelphia or BWI).

I was flying in and out of Dulles, though, before and after 11 September -- fucking hell. The TSA there were awful after that. I remember being queued up to go through security on the way back in to the US, with the US-passport-holders, and this one TSA guy strutting up and down the queue extolling the virtuals of being American, and God Bless America, and how lucky we were to be in the best damned country in the world! After an 8 1/2 hour flight and then being stuck in this unmoving queue for ages, it was horrible to listen to this guy (he was less cheery Gomer Pyle and more screaming Gen Patton in his style).

I also had a memorable border control agent who yelled at me after flipping through my passport, and seeing loads of Heathrow stamps; wasn't America good enough for me?!?!

I guess not, considering I don't live there anymore and have UK citizenship now (kind of like swapping tickets from the Hindenburg to the Titantic nationally-speaking at the moment, but hey).

BWI is way more pleasant for international travel; domestically it can get a bit frazzling as it's a Southwest hub. And I see someone else mentioned the horrendous security queues at Orlando...never fucking again. I've been on a flight to Orlando (both domestic and international) where I didn't end up with a horrible cold/flu thanks to the Mickey Mouse brigade, as well).

[greencalx]

Of all the US airports I've been through, Denver has probably been the kindest to me.

My first encounter was on a trip where I had spent a couple of days in Michigan before heading down to New Mexico. The ticketing arrangement for the internal leg was complicated - effectively BA had purchased the tickets on my behalf as part of the booking I had made with them for the round trip. Consequently this part of the trip involved flights with two airlines that ordinarily have nothing to do with each other. So when I checked in with United at Detroit they could give me a boarding card for their flight to Denver, but not for the Frontier flight from Denver to Albuquerque. Bizarrely my bag was checked through, but not me. The United flight then accrued a two hour delay, and I figured Frontier would probably be under no obligation to book me onto a later connection (assuming this even existed) as I was effectively a no-show.

Anyway, this is where the first bit of good fortune kicked in. I eventually realised I'd made a time zone error and would in fact arrive into Denver with about half an hour to make the connection. Sprinting off the plane I noticed a departure gate for ABQ - but a United flight rather than Frontier. I was informed that Frontier was in a faraway terminal and I'd need to get a train to get there. More sprinting, and a few country and western stings on the train, I reached the Frontier gate just as the last passenger was boarding. "I'm booked on this flight but don't have a boarding card yet" I panted at the member of staff at the gate. She asked me my name, handed me the boarding card with my name on it that was in her hand, and I immediately handed it back to her to board the flight. Slumping into the seat I was relieved to have made it, with the immediate realisation that my bag almost certainly hadn't. But hey ho, I'd been there before (including on my earlier flight into Detroit).

At ABQ I considered going straight to the baggage office but thought I might was well give the belt look first. There I was greeted with the sight of my bag rising from the bowels of the airport. At that point I figured out that my bag must have been untouched by human hand at Denver and conveyed automatically between the terminals. Some googling established this to be the case - apparently Denver was the first airport to have a fully automated baggage system, with predictably chaotic consequences when it was first introduced (see also Heathrow T5).

My second trip to Denver was less eventful, apart from the bus breaking down en route to the airport. Chilled security and a decent microbrewery near the gate. Also one time I stayed in downtown Denver, my room was upgraded to a suite, so overall my experience of that part of the world has been pretty good. (I never went to any cinemas though).

[im barry bethel]

Southend is smack bang next door to a housing estate, complete with chain link fence separating it from the Macdonald's. Car park a 20 second walk from the terminal, 10 minutes from leaving the plane to putting the suitcases in the boot.

Malta has an outside viewing platform so you can have a fag watching the planes landing.

Pula has the lift call button missing but the wiring is still intact.

Using London city in the summer so should be an eye opener

[Noodle Lizard]

Schiphol and Denver International are the only airports I can say I've actively enjoyed my time in.

[mothman]

DC was great (walkable, nice restaurants and attractions etc etc), but the airport is awful.

There's a whole thread to be done on visiting DC. I walked the whole length of the National Mall and back and then went to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum.

(later, I learned this is what everyone from my organisation does when there on business with a weekend to acclimatise before starting work on Monday; very embarrassing...)

Anyway, afterwards we could not find anywhere to eat. It must have been that one area we chose to head towards in search of food. Eventually we found a Starbucks where we could get a toasted panini...