Best and Worst Airports?

That transit through Dubai question has sparked this thought. What’s the best and worst airport you’ve used. Excluding the stupid teeny-tiny ones that double up as airports when they’re not being bob’s allotment and crab shack. My entries are

Surprisingly bad despite being a major hub 

Frankfurt and Charles De Gaulle. You would have thought Frankfurt would be the model of German efficiency, but it’s just a free for all with added German tourist tat for sale (Beer tankards and sausages round every corner) It’s vast and unwelcoming, and who knew that Germans don’t do queuing? CDG is just bad. I reckon they must send the architects/designers of new airports to CDG and tell them “This is how not to do airports” At the very least I guess it makes everything else seem better by comparison, although I’ve got it on good authority that Moscow Domodedovo is actual Hell made real on Earth. I’ve not been through it myself.

Best – and you expected to be.

Haneda: Obviously, If your transit goes wrong, the staff are forced to commit ritual suicide in front of you, although,  the shopping is a bit too cutesy in that twee Japanese way that starts to grate after a while, I was there for a bit too long and I was seeing knock-kneed cartoon school-girls with eyes that are too big in my nightmares.

Best- and you weren’t expecting it 

Tied for me is Denver, just for the conspiracy theory stuff and it’s size just boggles the mind, and how could you not enjoy an airport with a 30ft high anatomically correct blue stallion with eyes that light up red? and Bilboa. It’s small enough to have everything just to reach, and the final approach is really pretty.

C’mon, I want horror stories…

What are really irritates me about CDG is you can buy a Gucci handbag but you can’t find a decent coffee for love nor money.

Anchorage airport in Alaska is just like every other USA airport. Apart from the enormous stuffed Kenai bear stood on its back legs that greets you when you arrive… At that point, having been awake for 24+ hours it can be tempting to get straight back onto the plane.

I don’t mind Amsterdam. Yeah it’s big and busy but it does largely work.

worst has to be Grenoble
just a large barn . if your flight is delayed you have the joys of the one shop and a few vending machines to keep you occupied.
And if another plane lands just in front of yours , be prepared for the huge and very slow moving passport control line.
Gothenburg was excellent, just efficient

Worst

Dubai by a country mile. The “quiet” areas are anything but, there’s nowhere to pass the time overnight unless you pay an extortionate rate just to enter a bar and if you take migraines you just have to suffer. Grenoble would honestly be better. Even Prestwick.

Best

Changi. Swimming pool, cinema and just a generally nice place to be. I’ve spent hours there and not been bothered in the slightest.

Used to travel a lot with work 20 odd years ago.

Best – Zurich (efficient) / Dusseldorf (Pizza)

Worst – O’Hare (just bloody awful) and Manchester (was always a building site with added queues)

Lan Tao was pretty good as long as you didn’t have to board at Gate 100+, which was over the horizon. Narita was an experience, but in a good way.

[EDIT] – Had a 9 hour transit in Dubai and had to doss down on the floor as I couldn’t afford a hotel. Miserable.

Worst: Prague. OK, it’s a nice easy tram & bus ride from the centre of town, the public transport links are great. Get inside, check in, and then you get to the shops and some basic cafes. Then eventually you wander off to your gate…and they have security AT THE GATE. You are then forced to stand in a room designed for about 30 people with however many people Ryanair can cram onto a single 737 while the tiny security area deals with this sudden mad influx. Do it properly – put security after check-in, THEN have the shops.

Best: Manchester. More specifically – the new Terminal 2. I agree that Terminal 3 is still a shithole of epic proportions. Terminal 2 is like a different world. Large without being gigantic, airy, decent shops and cafes, loads of charging points. It does get some marks knocked off cos it’s full of Mancunians though.

Park in T2 multistory. Lift to the concourse and you’re right there at check-in. First time I flew from there I was dreading it (based on my experiences at T3 with Ryanair) but I parked up, wheeled the bike box to the lifts, was through check-in, through oversize baggage drop off, through security and sitting in Costa within 20 minutes. That left me about 2.5hrs to kill! I’d been expecting the normal T3 chaos but all my journeys through there have been almost enjoyable! Very efficient.

Toronto Pearson can be pretty horrendous – classic “Canadian customer service”, which generally involves small shrill women shouting at you that you should GO OVER THERE, even when you know damn well you’re supposed to be over here. Compounded by huge numbers of non-locals looking cluelessly around about what they’re supposed to do in this big official-looking building.

Heathrow is just vile. Once you’ve been to any other airport, you realise how long and badly handled the security queues are at Heathrow, how rude the staff are, and how crowded it all is. Plus if you ever have to change terminals airside, it’s desparately unpleasant experience; and the fact that you can’t make any kind of transfer in under 45 minutes (they literally won’t allow your boarding pass through the security gate) shows what a shambles it is.

Another surprisingly bad one is Dublin. It’s crowded; the Ryanair and Aer Lingus gates are miles away from security, the number of toilets is hugely inadequate and the food options are awful.

but you can’t find a decent coffee for love nor money.

This is true for the entire country though TBF

Do it properly – put security after check-in, THEN have the shops.

Pretty standard across many airports when the vast majority of flights leaving/arriving don’t need the additional ‘international’ checks.

CDG is truly awful. Even as a European passport holder it’s awful. Somehow they’d regularly mix up Schengen flight arrrivaks and dump them out into international forcing everyone to go through passport control and security again.  Then there’s the useless busses that take you between terminals. You’d think they’d know about of their connections, particularly with Air France / KLM, are scheduled at 50mins. But seemingly delivering pax to their appropriate terminal as swiftly and efficiently as possible is beyond the job description of the gitanes-toking bus-driving stereotypical embodiment.

FRA is also bloody awful. But then anyone who’s had to work extensively in Germany will know “German Efficiency” is pretty much marketing and spin.

Terminal 2 is like a different world.

I’ve had pretty much that same experience. Stumbled into the concourse after literally being herded through check-in and security like they were an Olympic qualifying event…and then had to find things to entertain myself. Very discombobulating

I haven’t been to any that are really terrible, mostly just average. Singapore easily the best.

Warsaw Modlin airport.

The London Luton of Poland, well over an hour to the city center  – That picture is the entire airport, in, out, baggage reclaim, passport control.

It’s effin freezing in winter and boiling in summer.

Best , probably Cork. Always quiet reasonable facilities.

Worst, Marrakesh – absolute cluster trying to leave the country via it, repeatedly checking one’s passport and a terrible lounge. Will never go there again.

Worst, Atatürk, chaos, a free for all, disorganised and a bit of a shithole. Turkish airlines on the other hand are pretty damn good.

Best, Chubu Centrair (Japan), excellent, flown in and out of there a lot, like anything Japanese, it just works and everything is correct. First time flying there, came out of the terminal building, looked a bit lost, was approached by one of the staff who asked where I was going and proceeded to walk me to the right bus, explain to the driver where I needed to get off, don’t get that anywhere else. At the right stop, driver calls me to the front.

Best, Barra. Go and chill on a beautiful beach before taking off from a sand runway.

Worst? All the others, everywhere, ever. Unless you’re at the bar at a Virgin Clubhouse after a shower and massage, having ridden to the airport.

bit like asking best and worst dog shit you’ve stepped in 😕

Changi. Swimming pool, cinema and just a generally nice place to be. I’ve spent hours there and not been bothered in the slightest

Plus 1.

Worst for me given Moranbah isn’t allowed probably either LAX or Heathrow.

Aside from crappy small ones, Geneva is the worst big one. Chaotic check-in and security. Eye wateringly expensive food and drink even by Swiss standards. Awful antiquated departure gates in those weird rotunda things they have

Singapore was nice. Free to use massage chairs was a highlight.

Heathrow is just vile

Heathrow is an easy target as an old-world sprawling mass of incremental development that’s way over capacity. However, travel through Frankfurt and you’ll quickly realise that as an old-world sprawling mass of incremental development that’s way over capacity, Heathrow does a lot of things really well.

I’m never really sure why Singapore Changi is so widely regarded as brilliant. It always seem over-rated to me with the added joy of security being at the departure gate. If you want an airport with a swimming pool then the one in Doha is much more pleasant – in fact it’s the best place in the airport. Of course, you’re still (i) in Doha and (ii) probably flying with Qatar Airways, so you’re not exactly winning at life.

Dubai is a throbbing sea of humanity queueing for a sh*t at 3am.

I’ve always liked Hong Kong, although with all of the development the terminal has lost some of its architectural purity and the airport as a whole is currently a bit of a mess.

Best: Samui
It’s changed a bit as it’s grown, but many of the buildings are made from bamboo. It has beautiful gardens with shady areas. The loos have fish tanks. Even in cattle class they give away free tea, coffee, fruit juice, pastries and sticky rice. The WiFi is good (not a given in that part of the world).
If I could put up a hammock I’d happily live there.

Worst: Dubai

Bucharest: people think it’s ok to occupy seats with their luggage whilst you stand then they jump queues.

Hong Kong: efficient and seriously good eateries. The old one was freaky when you could see what was on the telly through peoiple’s windows.

European airports as a Brit have got a lot worse post brexit. We get lumped in the non-Schengen area past passport control that usually has a vending machine and not much else.

Amsterdam and the Scandi airports use a one space model for departing and arriving traffic, meaning access to everything for everyone. Very nice.

JFK and ORD in the states are just 30 years out of date and massively lacking in space and infrastructure.

Italian airports are all a mess. Apart from Venice which flows really well.

Give me a small airport over a transfer monster any day.

Another +1 for Changi, what i remember most from it was just how quiet it felt compared to most noisy airports.

I do like it when i can fly out of tiny airports, like flying from Humberside to Esbjerg a year ago, think i saw around 20 people in total and there was 3 passengers on my flight, no surprise that route did not las long.

Worst: any small regional airport that is bloated by skiers in the winter. Chambery, Lyon, Innsbruck. They’re all crap

Munich is really easy to get to, to navigate around and has helpful staff, ditto Zurich.

Been to most of the above when work travelling, used to like Stuttgart and Vienna

Best: Kerry airport. 10 miles from home.

Worst: Luton – if Ryanair made airports…

Worst for me given Moranbah isn’t allowed probably either LAX or Heathrow.

My flight from Heathrow to LAX was amazingly smooth and the transfer through LAX (onward to Sydney) was so quick and easy I was genuinely worried that something had gone wrong. It was one of those “it cannot be this simple” moments.

Even US Border Control was polite and efficient.

Toronto Pearson can be pretty horrendous – classic “Canadian customer service”, which generally involves small shrill women shouting at you that you should GO OVER THERE, even when you know damn well you’re supposed to be over here. Compounded by huge numbers of non-locals looking cluelessly around about what they’re supposed to do in this big official-looking building.

Interesting – I flew via toronto and despite it being huge and only having 2 hours for a connection for a domestic flight from an international one I got thru it all in 1/2 an hour and found everyone helpful and friendly

I haven’t gone thru London airports for years following bad experiences.  I will pay extra to avoid going theru London

Clement Ferrand was great

Worst Heathrow by a country mile. Best Manchester or Birmingham. Overseas worst Marrakesh and Kathmandu. Best Vancouver and Turin

Worst – almost every airport on the US East coast.  And Schiphol.  It’s just too big and there seems to be no order to where flights and connections are gated.  On any given day, in the whole world, there is nowhere where more people are running pell mell than than in Schiphol on an ordinary day.

Best – I’m going to go against the grain here and say Heathrow.  Given the incremental development, it’s amazing how well it all works.  There’re plenty of shops, bars, restaurants at each terminal, security is usually very fast, movement between terminals is easy and you can walk almost everywhere and there’s plenty of information.  I’ll admit when it goes wrong, due to the above 98% utilisation at LHR, it quickly unspools.

I think Stansted deserves a mention for how it has deliberately been made worse.

European airports as a Brit have got a lot worse post brexit. We get lumped in the non-Schengen area past passport control that usually has a vending machine and not much else.

I’m pretty sure that pre-Brexit we were non-Schengen and departed from gates past passport control… What has got worse is having to queue in the non-EU passport control lanes on departure – seems particularly slow and painful in Germany.

It’s probably against the OP rules but I only came here to say Inverness is wonderful and by far the nicest airport I use. Security takes 2 minutes, and the views are lovely.

Changi is ok but a bit dull. Nice is badly laid out and full of awful entitled man-child-skiers. Plus they carried out a controlled explosion about 15 metres from me without any warning.

Also hated LAX, but paranoia and jet lag may have had something to do with that.

I think Stansted deserves a mention for how it has deliberately been made worse.

…from a pretty low starting point. In the middle of nowhere.

Best Vancouver

Every airport should have a giant aquarium IMO

bit like asking best and worst dog shit you’ve stepped in 😕

I’m with @Klunk.

I’m amazed by how much more pleasant I find travelling by train than air, even in places where it’s not great – Amsterdam Eurostar terminal.

I’m glad I don’t travel much any more, it was only the alcohol that made it bearable

Worst experience for a major airport is Ben Gurion, there is no contest.

Luton takes some beating but I think Santiago Chile has managed. Queues to queues to queues. But it’s on the way to Patagonia so it’s ok. In the “humble brag” theme, Lukla is pretty bad but it’s cos you’re looking at the likely end of your life and all you can think about is how bad your guts feel

Best? Hmmm.  CPH? AMS used to be ok but it’s got much bigger and busier lately.

Agree with CDG absolutely awful place. I met an American there recently and when we finally found each other his first words were ‘nice building but where’s the **** exit’.

Amsterdam security is great. Manchester T3 is a shithole, I pick loads of people up from there and I feel embarrassed

I really like Edinburgh but I am only in there for a short time. Park on the second floor of the multi story, walk through fast pass ten minutes in total and you are through security.