The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s the best and worst airport you’ve been to?

I’ve been to many, many airports. As I write this, I keep thinking of ones I haven’t mentioned. So these are my most immediate thoughts on the good, the bad and the forgettable airports I’ve flown out of.

There was an airport in Malaysia, when I moved here, LCCT (Low Cost Carrier Terminal) that was truly a bus station in the way it handled crowds. It was nothing special, but it functioned incredibly quickly, as long as you didn’t need any extras, like food or duty-free shopping. In many ways, it reminded me of Stansted, one of London’s many airports, and the first one I ever flew into London.

But Stansted was not as organized. When we landed at Stansted, in 1989, they pulled up a staircase, and you descended (yes, I’ve done that many places). What made this one uniquely bad was that to get to the terminal, and customs, you were escorted to a fence, crossed a road, and then entered the terminal. Crossing a road to get from my airplane to the terminal is something I only ever experienced once, and that was it.

Where the LCCT, long since replace by KLIA 2, felt organized and functional in its minimalism, Stansted just felt slapped together. Who the hell puts a road through an airport?

My other “I hate this airport and try to avoid it” is also in London. Let’s hear it for Heathrow! No, no clapping, just boos please. A word to the wise, if you have to transit through Heathrow, give yourself a lot of time because teh odds are very good that your connection will be in one of the other six terminals, and transit between the terminals is slow, poorly thought out and just generally useless.

Airports that I have loved and a quick mention of why:

Dubai airport is the most upscale shopping mall you’ve ever visited, with many gold and jewelry merchants, toilet attendants who wiped down your stall before and after your use, and these big bay windows that showed a ‘parking lot’ full of commercial airliners and private jets.

Schipol (Amsterdam) is one big grocery store with an emphasis on cheese. Also, it has best passenger lounges that you can buy your way into, and excellent shower facilities (I’m looking at you Heathrow).

I’ve been to Changi (Singapore) but before the great remodeling and the waterfall. Since there are two flights a day from our town to Singapore, I’d love to do a day visit of just the airport.

Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is, I think, the best airport in Canada. I love the layout and the artwork. The final approach over the Strait of Georgia is beautiful and a great chance to whale watch.

There are many airports that I’ve departed from that didn’t make much of an impression on me, despite others singing their praises: Frankfurt and Munich airports, Charles De Gaulle, Incheon, Tokyo-Haneda, even a few that should’ve been more memorable, like Entebbe, Uganda or Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi.

The smallest airport I’ve flown out of would probably be the Andimba Toivo ya Toivo Airport in Ondangwa, Namibia. However, as an air cadet, we did a day of glider flight on an unregulated grass field in southern Ontario, so if that counts…