Readers’ airport nightmares keep de Gaulle first on the worst list — I have never liked this airport because of it inconvenience but how much worse than SFO is this facility? And unless you’ve been to the Moscow Airport you haven’t seen the worst of the worst. Saigon is pretty bad too.
“Our shuttle driver,” wrote Joy Robinson, “was genuinely amused that construction vehicles blocking our access caused us to miss our connection.”
Just as the security staff had no idea how to handle my wife’s diabetic syringe, neither did they have a clue what to do when Barbara Seaney’s pacemaker set off the metal detector.
“There they sat me down in a curtained booth while I waited what seemed like a very long time for I didn’t know what,” she wrote. “Eventually a policeman showed up, stayed while I was checked over, and then let me join my friends who were as mystified and impatient as I.”
Well, I can not claim to have gone to Saigon or Moscow airports, but of the ones I have been to, I would rather have my teeth pulled without pain killers than go to LAX
Try Lagos Airport in Nigeria. Not content to rob passengers of their luggage, ground crews strip aircraft of parts for the black market while taxiing on the runway. A visit to the departures lounge lavatory could be your last.
Ah, I love the place dearly. When you’re returning from the US, where you were received with the usual several hour long welcoming process, you can look at the long queue of connection-missers taking turns to be shrugged at, and think, ‘payback!’ as you breeze through on your EU passport. (-:
I’ve been to Шереметьево 2 (Moscow International airport) numerous times and except for the shody state of its ceiling, it’s not worse then any international airport (including the US ones):
* customs are invariably rude
* you always get through customs before your luggage arrives
* security always wants to know why I carry 3 cables with my laptop (UTP, X-UTP, Console)
* the time check-in takes is always the inverse of the time you have
* when the battery of your laptop is dead, you’re in trouble as security cannot provide a power socket to allow you to prove that it can boot.
* when your flight is more then 20 minutes late, your driver has left
* and best of all: Never wrap marzipan in tin foil and put it in your hand luggage as it comes out as semtex / C3 on their scanner and you’ll be accompanied at gunpoint to an interrogation room without anyone explaining you why…
It’s just part of the frequent flyer’s life.
🙂
Fabrizio
Hehe, I flew from SFO to de Gaulle to Moscow… now that’s crazy.