[Closed] Worst ever airport stop over

CDG or ORD.

Not even fLounge access can redeem them!

Antigua, 6 hrs.

Mrs SR and I were moving to St Kitts, and we had left Toronto early in the morning to arrive in Antigua for about 13:00. We then had to wait 6 hours for our connection to St Kitts in the sweltering heat on those hard fibreglass tub-type seats.

Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. A skittish, youngish couple in exile. Not a great situation.

Dakar. After dark, can't remember how long, all I can remember is the smell...

Hong Kong, 6 days.

Flying back from a friends wedding in NZ, and some inconsiderate prick in Iceland had decided to wake the volcano gods.

2 days in the airport hotel until they put the rates up to £400 a night, then a further 4 nights in a crappy hotel on "Dried Fish Street" in Central HK.

It smelled revolting, and seeing some of the massive shark fins in the shop windows made me sad.

Plovdiv (8hrs)I think they ran out of de-icer.

Ashgabat Turkmenistan

Think 1980s backwoods UK train station.

Metal bench

No.bar or shop

10pm till 3 am.

Although it'll be. A close call with the 6hrs in Charles Dr Gaulle next Thursday

Saddam Hussein International Airport, Baghdad. We were flying back from ****stan using Iraqi Air so it was the airline's hub. Something like 8hrs, nothing at all to do in the transfer lounge. Worse was no loo paper in the bogs - which when you've got the s**ts isn't ideal 😮

Second worst was some refuelling stop in the Caribbean on the way to Lima - as with Saxonrider just had to wait in the bus shelter of a terminal until the plane was ready to go, probably a couple of hours.

Doha.

Another for Antigua here.....awful airport when I was there 15years ago.

LAX on the way to Auckland - holding pen for hours - grim.
Delhi on way to Thailand - really grim.

10 hrs or something ridiculous at CDG. Where I was sitting/slumping overlooked a compound area and I was becoming quite an expert on the variety of aircraft tow bars by the time I left.

Stanstead 2000 (i think) Coming back from snowboarding holiday. Plane was hijacked meant we missed our connecting flight to N.Ireland. Luggage didn't arrive - slept on floor for several hours as the press had taken all the local digs. Skint and starving. Eventually got somewhere to stay about 30 miles away but arrived 5 minutes after they stopped serving food. Woke up in the middle of the night as the hotel was burgled. Got home to find my car was stolen. Good holiday all the same 😀

I lost my passport in Croatia in June. By the time I got it back from the police I had missed my flight. I had to spend two days in Pula eating fish and drinking ice-cold beer in the sun before getting home.

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Two days I tell you, what an absolute nightmare.

student trip to milan. plane over sold, so 10 of us slept in the airport to wait for the next flight. Milan BGY is tiny - pretty provinical. i think flights stopped at 10pm.

high and low points include: midnight trolley racing. sleeping in a corridor on cardboard. being woken up by a sub machine gun toting guard. waking in the morning thinking i was spooning lucy - & fining out it it was tom!

when we eventually got to fly back the next day the security guard attempted for me to remove my trousers at the security check - i told in to do one and he let me through!

Jakarta, a proper dump. My plane dropped off the board at the terminal it was meant to be at, and nobody could tell me where it was arriving/leaving from.
Lounges still had smoking areas and I'm sure that was where I finally got food poisoning from.

After that the 7am arrivals into Sydney waiting for the 2pm flight out after 24hrs of travelling is grim even with a lounge to hide in.

LAX for just being incompetent.

Schiphol, just flown in from Maestricht waiting for the onward connection to London not knowing if there was going to be one. The date: 11th September 2001. Quietest airport I've ever been in.

+1000 for Doha
its a sh*t hole, also the bus transfer to the plane was so long I thought they were driving us to Manchester

Early morning in Gatwick (naybe Stanstead...can't remember), connecting flight was rescheduled so I arrived hours early, had about four hours to kill, was sat there reading at the gate alone, and then realised that someone had taken a massive dump on the floor.

Early morning in Gatwick (naybe Stanstead...can't remember)... and then realised that someone had taken a massive dump on the floor.

Definitely sounds like Gatwick.

Easter Island.

We were en-route from Christchurch to Santiago, and the plane made an emergency diversion due to an earthquake. The whole of the southern Pacific was on tsunami alert, so we weren't allowed out of the airport because it was the only part of the island that was protected. Eventually, we were allowed to take off once the runway in Santiago had passed a safety check.

So, I touched down in one of the most amazing places on the entire planet, and all I got to do was sit on the floor for a few hours.

LAX is just one of the worst airports ever especially the international side. It's worth entering the USA elsewhere and getting an internal flight to LAX to avoid the international terminal.

Once in Tom Bradly it's not that bad, all my problems were around Delta out of there - well mostly due to the Americans

9hrs, Abu Dhabi, I was paranoid about DVT so marched round and round the ring donut shaped waiting areas for much of the time

Waiting in Abu Dhabi is much improved if you have access to one of the Ethihad lounges. The Business Class one is nice.

Ethihad lounges. The Business Class one is nice.

While I agree that LAX is awful, for some reason or other the last couple of times I've been through, I've been given the full VIP escort service through transfer.

Which was nice. #rockstarpaperclips

5 hours in Niamey after the plane broke down on route home from Burkina Faso after 6 weeks at work wasn't particularly pleasant.

Delhi on way to Thailand - really grim.

akarta, a proper dump.

LAX is utter bollocks. I can kind of forgive the sweltering sheds that pass for airports in Africa, but LAX can go **** itself.

Addis Ababa is a horrible airport, I once spent 6 hours there and being at altitude it was freezing cold. While I was killing time a babble of shouting Arabic voices began to reach my ears, getting slowly louder until an ET official in a green jacket came into view, shuffling along holding a radio and a clipboard aloft and being mobbed by a crowd of about 100 Arabs of all shapes and sizes, all gobbing off loudly and gesticulating angrily. Slowly this flotilla moved away down the terminal and about half an hour later it came back, still the same long-suffering official in the middle of the same mob of enraged Arabs. It was a bizarre and slightly unsettling sight in the middle of the night.

At Nairobi last year KQ cancelled their evening Dreamliner flight to Paris because they don't have any pilots senior enough to be licenced to land in fog and the week before the plane had had to divert to London so they didn't want to run the risk again. It took KQ a couple of hours to organise a bus to take PAX to an hotel but some French guys and I agreed the hotel would probably be horrible and we'd do better staying in the terminal. There's a sleeping room in the business lounge but there was one massively obese African man asleep on the floor in there, snoring like a horse so people kept coming in, gasping in shock and walking out again. Eventually I also gave up and we all bedded down on the benches along the wall with blankets. I stuck my iPod plug in my exposed ear, put on some music and managed to sleep right through to 7 am when I awoke surrounded by serious Kenyan business people drinking coffee and working on their laptops, looking at me as if I was a tramp. When the other PAX made it back to the airport we were proved right as they'd had a lengthy bus ride followed by about 3 hours of sleep in a horrible hotel in a noisy street with windows that wouldn't shut and mosquitos buzzing all around them.

Lagos is a grim place to spend time, I stay at the Sheraton in Ikeja about 10 kms from the airport. Most European flights leave between 11.00 and 11.55 but you have to leave the hotel at 6 pm in case a truck has fallen over or heavy rain has flooded the airport road. That means you usually get through all the checks by about 7.30 and have hours to kill.

Just a refuel in Bogota in the early hours. Half the lights were out, there was nothing open, not even for coffee. The duty-free displays of emeralds behind thick glass were protected by armed guards who made threatening gestures with their guns if anyon went close for a look.

Another refuel in Ougandougou, this time under hot midday sun, here we stayed on the plane. At the engine restart there was a local employee clutching a fire extiguisher and looking nervously at the engine. I thought if anything adverse happened he'd drop the extinguisher and run, for I could see how white his knuckles were.

4 hour stopover in Madrid.
Trying to spend the £180, that we saved by not flying to Tenerife directly, on beer.
It was terrible.
(Allegedly)

I've slept on a Red Cross cot in Lyon airport, after being diverted from Chambery because of a snowstorm, sitting on the runway for five hours before finally being let off the plane.

Wasn't too bad to be honest, my mate had bought a bottle of Highland Park from duty free on the way out 🙂

We went to Kenya over the 1989/1990 new year period flying with Ethiopian Airlines. On the return journey the flight was delayed leaving Nairobi and given that there was only an hour's transfer time in Addis Ababa I asked one of the stewardesses if we'd make the connection. "Yes, it shouldn't be a problem."

Of course when we get to AA, the flight to London (1200 every day) has left. We knew this because the same stewardess went on the intercom to inform us. We therefore had to spend 24hrs in AA and so had to go through customs/immigration.

The chap at the immigration desk looks at us and says "You can't enter Ethiopia on a temporary visa unless I know what time your flight out is", "It's 1200 tomorrow, the London Heathrow flight", "I'm unable to confirm that. Go and ask at that desk over there for official flight times". That desk "over there" was on the Ethiopian side of the immigration desk so we trot across the terminal building to ask the same stewardess as before what time is the next flight to London. "1200 tomorrow". Armed with this important detail we walk back out of Ethiopia and offer this new bit of information to the immigration chap. "OK. And what's the flight number?" Cue the Brits trotting across the terminal to ask the same stewardess ... At this point I handed my passport to one of my friends and sat down leaning against a wall (actually in Ethiopia) and watched this group of Brits wander backwards and forwards across the terminal gathering pieces of information one at a time to be allowed into the country.

Once all that was done we spent the day and night in a hotel used by Haile Selassie for his guests when he was in power before heading back to the airport to have five stamps officiously entered into our passports and we left the country.

So, I touched down in one of the most amazing places on the entire planet, and all I got to do was sit on the floor for a few hours.

If that's the measure of "worst airport stop over" I'll see your Easter Island, but raise you Fiji and Santiago on the same trip. All 3 were stopovers of various lengths on the way to La Paz. Not one of them saw me leaving the airport. The Santiago enforced camping out on airport benches was because English people were advised they may not be very welcome in Chile at the time due to [url= https://www.theguardian.com/world/1998/oct/18/pinochet.chile ]Pinochet's recent UK arrest.[/url]

the 14 hours I spent in Bangkok airport in 1995. Of the 14 hours I probably spent 10 of them in the toilets courtesy of some dodgy rice I had on Koh Samui. All I drank was rehydration fluids, I am sure the security thought I was up to something dodgy, or perhaps on reflection they had seen it all before.

LAX. So disappointing, it's Hollywood ffs, how can the airport be so low-rent?!

Dakar, 10 hours either swatting flies from my nether regions in the toilets, or watching some bloke in a nappy painting the white line down the centre of the runway between landings.

Jimw - did you see me being propositioned by a male security guard - asking if I wanted to go back to his after his shift finished? If I didn't there may be an issue with my luggage? Managed to hide in the loo for 4 hours until my flight.... I'm sure that must have been you in the adjacent trap!!!

If it was me I would have been feeling far too sorry for myself to notice i'm afraid. I was more worried about being accused of preying on others tbh

Dubai, 17 hrs 20 mins.

Thanks for reminding me.

Delays were due to fog. Fair enough, nothing anyone can do about that.

But the service we received from Emirates was truly atrocious, with some bordering-on-frightening moments at the airport (crowds, crushes, lack of information, misleading information, staff disappearing for hours on end...)

Then when we got to our destination (Cochin), they told us our bags were in Paris, and disappeared, again.

We're never flying Emirates again. 👿

Worst was easily Oksaka, not because it's a bad place, just because it was in my way. One sunny Monday Morning in Feb I woke up in Melborne, which isn't a bad way to start a week, but I was half glum, half excited because after 10 months away I had decided the day before that today was the day I was going home (mild starvation and homelesness played a small part in that) so I brushed my teeth, said goodbye to the Church Vicar that was letting me doss in his hall and headed to the bus stop, boarded the bus and didn't get off again for 18 hours when it reached Sydney, then a hiked across the city to the offices of the airline to beg them to rebook my flight, without payment - tricky, but it was okay, sort of, before I could ask they said they were very sorry, but my flight didn't exist anymore... they didn't fly that route anymore, it it was okay - they'd upgrade me to business for at least part of the trip if I could leave now "Yeah, by now, when do you mean" "now, now - can you get to the airport in 90 mins" "no sorry" "We'll drive you".

My total trip was:

Monday - 11am bus to Sydney arrived 5am Tuesday.
9am Tuesday ANA Office to Airport for about 10:30.
Boarded 11:30ish - flew to Brisbane about 5 hours I think.
Left Brisbane at 7pm -
Arrived Osaka 2am... Wednesday sat on the cold hard floor for 6 hours...
Flew to Tokyo - 8am - it's a 747 but it's crammed with seats like I've never seen on another other airliner because it's a commuter bus with wings - the flight time is less than an hour, it doesn't ever 'level off' up and down again and if you look out of the window, you never really see where Osaka stops and where Tokyo starts.
Arrived about 9am - at this point I'm exhausted, starving, dazed and confused and looking at a flight that doesn't leave until 2pm - tomorrow? Have I got that right? But it's okay, ANA are waiting for me - they've got me a hotel room, I'm sort of prying that it's 'full board' because I've got 15c AUS to my name, to this day I've no idea if it was or not - but I walked into the resturant - pointed at a hotdog with lettce and sweetcorn on it and they gave it to me with a bow - more than eddible, I had 3 more. Then again at midday-ish and for dinner I had 2 hotdogs and a thing with noodles.
Thursday at 2pm I started my last leg and finally touched down at 4am on Friday morning - only because of the time difference whilst it was 4am Friday to me, it was about 8pm in London and still thursday.

My only plan to get home was a hastily sent e-mail to my best mate during the 5mins free Internet at an 'internet terminal' (this was 2000 kids, internet was a new thing and expensive) in Oksaka - he wasn't able to pick me up as he was busy but he talked a bloke I hardly knew to pick me up - he was a sight for sore eyes! 4 hours later I knoced on my Mums door and asked to stay ha ha.

I used to work internationally for 2 or 3 month stints, good money and I enjoyed the job & being in foreign climes.
It was hanging around in airports that did me in the end.
I now commute and work in Accrington every day - that's how mind numbingly boring it was at times!

Heathrow December 2010. Basically terminal closed and a handful of flights leaving the day before ours was due to go.
Pregnant Wife
Me being offered a wheelchair due to back issues, could barely walk.
-13 degrees.
Honeymoon. To Australia.

Sacked off after about 8 hour wait to find we'd been bumped off the flight.
Left on honeymoon 10 days later.

Tangiers. It was shut when we got there. Slept in a bush outside.

Belgrade. Diverted there from Pula before flying on to UK. Sat in the plane on a taxiway well away from the buildings. Armed police in evidence. WHY? No one said a dicky bird but we were aware the area was warming up for the Balkan war.

3 days in Nova Scotia on 9/11? Actually that was ok. The Canadians were amazingly welcoming. Probably my worst has been a typhoon in Hing Kong that meant a massive stay on airport couches, or maybe a layover in S Korea at the hotel Cherbourg, which I think is south Koreas version of Fawlty towers.

Frankfurt for 1 hour. Take trainers if you have a connecting flight.

4 days in Montreal back in 2002. My ticket, booked with airmiles direct from KLM got lost in the post. They told me it would be fine and I just needed to go to the airport with my passport for the flight. The airport is 20+ miles from the city centre where I had been staying with my then girlfriend. I broke up with her before leaving for the airport. They wouldn't allow me to board the plane, despite being able to see I had booked a seat and told me I would have to come back the following day when the ticket office was open. I spent my last money on a room at the airport hotel for the night. Then next day I was very rudely told by the obnoxious man on the ticket desk that I would need to get another ticket from KLM or buy a ticket for $2000. Due to the time difference the KLM ticket office in the Netherlands and the ticket desk in Montreal were never open at the same time. I had to go grovelling back to the poor girl I had just dumped for a place to sleep while I spent the next 2 days on the phone and bussing the 40miles back and forth to the airport sorting the mess out. I have refused to fly KLM ever since.

Last week in Palma airport 12 hours in the very hot departure lounge with an 8 & 10 year old,Flight finally got cancelled so got put in a hotel with rooms that stank of sh*t. After more cancellations we finally arrived home at 5.30am Monday rather the the original predicted 7.00pm on the Sat. Still arguing with Easy Jet about all the extra costs that we ended forking out for.

another one for Jakarta

short stopover on the way to Australia became a 16 hour delay in the hole of a departure lounge

hateful place

Dhaka, Bangladesh for two days while Biman Bangladesh fixed the plane (it began decompressing soon after take off, condensation pouring from everywhere). Panic turnaround and landing. They put us up for two nights in a reasonable hotel, fed us, but two days, 10 hrs each, waiting in the non airconditioned terminal with limited facilities got a bit wearing. No visa's, so we couldnt go far.
When the plane was ready we had to walk/run about a mile over the concrete, then sit in the plane with our luggage on our knees for the two hours to Kathmandu. I'd still swap it for work though!
La Guardia in NY when our internal flight was cancelled was horrid, and expensive. United airlines staff vanished minutes after the flight was cancelled, and NY was booked up that night. Ended up in a fortress like place in the Bronx, $300 for the night, $70 for taxis.

Frankfurt for 1 hour. Bring trainees if you have a connecting flight

Yeah that was never going to be fun. Shirt layovers are just silly.

How ever my travel company have gone too far the other way and try to send us a flight early....6-10hours waiting ffs

You lot are worrying me... The next three weeks see me visiting a bunch of the places and airlines you mention...

Frankfurt for 1 hour. Take trainers if you have a connecting flight.

The best for transferring is Schiphol, at least you're in the same building and it's not a bad walk.