Worst airport you have been in

[disappointed101]

Travelling through BHX this evening. Looks like a building site, no staff to be seen at check in, then a poor guy turns up apologising for lack of staff. Security an absolute mess, lots of staff having a lovely chat whilst the queue moves at a snails pace, nobody taking control. Awful. It’s got to be up with the worst experience I’ve had. Luckily our flight is delayed due to fog, else we wouldn’t have made it. What’s your worst experience in an airport?

Sharm el Sheikh

The best airport ever is Dubai..absolutely insane

Sorry about this but good on your insurance company.

For me, Dubai is the worst - the bling and lights are migraine-inducing and the whole place is in sharp contrast to the lives of the people who are shipped in to work there for very little. I agree with the posters who said Vancouver was the best. I also like the small, regional airports in Australia.

Luton car parking and drop off was still a total shit show since the car parking fire when I was there a few months ago. No idea how long till it’ll be sorted.

Yes, I agree.
I can't stand the giant shopping centres with an airport attached trying to wring every penny out of the prisoners held there.

Kefalonia horrendous !

It is, without any doubt, Dalaman

Find it unbelievable that no one has mentioned Mexico City International yet. It's awful, and I lived there for several years so got to experience it's "wonder" several times a year. When you get off the plane there is instantly a smell of sewage in the building and there are always at least 2 toilets closed and leaking. Sometimes the airport management will let you all get off the plane and then enclose you in the air bridge for several minutes, for no good reason, until they decide that yes, you are allowed to enter the airport and proceed to immigration. Once you get to the luggage carousels, you will quite likely be waiting at least an hour for the suitcases to appear, and even then it will be at the rate of maybe 6 or 7 cases, then the carousel stops for maybe 10 minutes until a few more cases are thrown on. This will be the case for all the carousels in the hall, leading to hundreds of very angry and frustrated people who just want to get home or to their hotel. In the airports defence, I have never had to wait longer than 20 minutes when I've flown back from the UK, but flights from the USA would always result in a 1-2hr wait for your suitcases. And we flew between Mexico City and the USA an awful lot. With 2 other flights also waiting for their luggage at the same carousel, so it's claustrophobic in there by this point. Then, once you've got your cases, you might grab a trolley so you can get to your car/taxi/bus etc, but as soon as you leave the luggage hall you aren't allowed a trolley UNLESS you pay an airport employee to push your trolley for you. you are not allowed to push your own trolley, which i find completely bonkers. The area for taxis and ubers is chaos - there are highway and airport police blowing whistles and waving their arms but this is all for show and there is no real system in place, the drivers are in a free for all battle to get to the kerbside and collect their passengers. and then you are looking at being stuck in traffic for several hours even if you are only
travelling 8 or 9kms because there is no easy way out of this area of the city and if you leave around 11pm there is the cities biggest music venue just around the corner which slows traffic down even more.

And that is just arriving into Mexico City, don't get me started on departures. Heathrow and Gatwick are heavenly in comparison! It is an airport falling to bits and very poorly managed, and if i ever have to go there again i might have a breakdown!

Heathrow T5 is like that. There is not nearly enough seating or coffee places when it gets busy.

But there are plenty of shops with empty space.

@laddersandsnakes12

Ah, I've just about got over a period in my life when I had to visit that place in a professional capacity maybe half a dozen or so times a year...

You've brought it all flooding back 😱

Phoenix was dreadful this year. Utter chaos.

Yep but the shops are paying an arm and a leg in rentals.

T5A hasn't been helped by the addition of at least one "pay for" lounge since it opened which removed some of the free seating....

It's all about revenue.

@notimagain I can only apologise wholeheartedly for making you relive this airport.

I can't say I have a 'worst' airport as I've always approached them as an 'experience'; when I worked in the Terminals at Gatwick in the 80s as a PSA I recognized that people found them 'stressful' places because there was often so much 'riding' on making the journey - a much wanted and needed holiday, family reunion, important business trip, etc - and so little time to go through the process and so many things to remember.

Very shocked to see that Exeter was mentioned (once)! It's a gift of an airport experience. I hope to try out Newquay soon, but that'll be down to Mr O'Leary flying to where I want to go.

My favourite airport experiences were as a child in the 60-70s going through Bangor, Maine as the entry point to the US before travelling on to Oakland (across the Bay from SFO). We'd immigrated to the US so DF could fly jets rather than the prop jobs and he wanted a new start.

Bangor was just a hangar given over to processing passengers (customs and immigration) whilst the planes refuelled and the crews changed.

Charles de Gaulle. Worst maze I've ever been in. Missed my connecting flight and it took me over an hour to find the right desk to re-book.

Sao Paolo airport. We were stuck waiting for hours at a gate where the only open shop was one that sold large, fragile glass models of birds.

In fact there was nowhere to sit down at all in the departure lounge when I last used it. Every single seat was taken.

A good number of years ago I flew from Dominica airport in the Caribbean (not Dominican Republic) to Miami (then going from there to UK), had been on a cruise ship.

The airport is tiny (as one would expect on a not very touristy small island in the Caribbean), but there was a couple of places to get something to eat. Went through security into the "departure lounge", basically a room with plastic school chairs and we waited and waited. Flight was delayed, hours went by, there was no food or drink in there and people got hungry and thirsty but we were told we can't go back through security to get something.

Time went on and enough of us got annoyed enough that they let us go back out to get drinks and food and then had to go back through security. Waited some more, plane finally arrived and they were really rushing to get people off the plane, more so than I've ever seen anywhere.

I had been chatting to an English lady that was working there and asked her what was up and she explained that the sun was going down shortly and once it had we couldn't takeoff as the runway had no lights! They got everyone off, and us on, but then we had to wait while they got some dogs off the runway, made it with minutes to go or would have been stuck there for the night!