If I may take an opinion on this having lived in Berlin for 2 years, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this is that this new airport isn't just like a better, fancier one that'll replace an already adequate airport(s) - Berlin's existing airports (Tegel the 'main' one and Schonefeld the secondary) are, to put it mildly, an embarrassment for the captial city of Europe's biggest economy.
They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these.
It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first).
To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.
Tegel is one of my favorite airports in Germany since I can reach it from central Berlin in 20 minutes by public transport and in the main terminal most gates are less than 5 minutes away from the entrance, so you could in theory arrive 40 minutes before your plane departs.
The building is very old of course and you can see that it far exceeds the capacity for which it was planned, still in terms of convenience it's hard to beat, and I'm not looking forward to having to fly from BER sometime in the future (though I'm pretty confident it won't fully open before 2025, if ever).
I can only assume you've never been in a > 2 hour security queue during peak travel time due to Tegel's small departure gates / security staff / screening capacity, with a flight leaving in 40 minutes.
Sure I have but that's mostly a problem for terminal C in my experience, as the budget airlines fly from there and they seems to have a different ratio of personnel to passengers. Airlines that mostly serve business travelers usually have better gate positions and more staff.
It's not personnel, they have to stop the queues from moving through security in order to prevent over crowding in the gate rooms which, are always over packed full of people.
Berlin's awful setup results in delays across the region, it's no wonder other airports are reluctant to link there and divert to Frankfurt instead.
You must be mixing up the airports. Tegel is unique in that it has security and passport controls for each individual gate.
This allows you to arrive at almost the exact moment the gate closes because there will be no passengers for other flights in a queue with you. The gate agents can even see you going through security and will wait for a minute or so.
My worst airport experience has been trying (and failing, twice; on consecutive days) to fly from Tegel Terminal C to Helsinki (EasyJet). My best airport experiences have been flying from Tegel Terminal A (Finnair) to Helsinki.
if you happen to arrive at tegel ahead of time or even worse your flight is delayed, you are screwed. Once in the security area there is little to no decent food nor shopping option.
Singapore's airport also does right-before-gate screenings at 3 of its 4 terminals.
Unlike Tegel, though, the gate area and the screening areas are open spaces, with glass to separate. Tegel always feels a bit claustrophobic, and as a jet-lagged traveller my first time departing, I admit it took awhile for me to figure out where the hell I needed to go.
Unless a plane is delayed or cancelled at the last minute, which in TXL's case is frequent. This results in a gate full of too many people and a slow down moving anyone anywhere.
Agree, I once had a trip door to door between Berlin Prenzlauer Berg and Haidhausen (Munich‘s Prenzlauer Berg...) in 3 hours and 10 minutes. Everything worked beautifully and by chance I hopped between different modes of public transport in no time... Compare that to a trip from London‘s city center via Heathrow. In 3 hours you might just have worked your way to entering the plane.
If you're worried about security lines why not fly out of London City? Yeah it's all the way out on the east end, and yeah DLR is pretty gross, but getting from the train to the gate takes about 10 minutes.
Schönefeld requires an extra cost ticket, the Tegel bus works on your normal AB ticket (day pass or single ride). Having watched the addition of rail service to OAK (and SFO), I don't really see the attraction. In the case of Oakland, the bus was faster, half the cost, and dropped you off closer to the airport. With Tegel, the bus is relatively quick (around 20 minutes from the Hauptbahnhof) — my only complaint is the lack of ventilation and cooling onboard (which is often a problem on trains too).
Quite frankly New York has a similar problem. There is rail service to JFK but requires an extra cost ticket and it's a fairly long trip (moreso if you're taking the subway instead of LIRR). I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money. Yeah, Newark has rail (but it doesn't run particularly late).
> I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money.
It won't get you there quicker. A hypothetical non-stop direct bus route from most places in Manhattan to JFK would take around an hour under ideal conditions, about the same as the train already does. And in non-ideal conditions (around rush hour) and with multiple stops along the route, you would be looking at something like 2 hours, and worse on bad days.
It won't get you there quicker. A hypothetical non-stop direct bus route from most places in Manhattan to JFK would take around an hour under ideal conditions, about the same as the train already does. And in non-ideal conditions (around rush hour) and with multiple stops along the route, you would be looking at something like 2 hours, and worse on bad days.
There's a big caveat though: from Midtown. Getting to JFK from elsewhere in Queens (or e.g. Brooklyn) is a pretty circuitous route on the train. A bus could easily do that in less than two hours. On a good day a subway ride into Manhattan might take you half an hour. On a bad day…
I mean, look, I prefer rail, but not by so much that I'd ding Tegel (or Oakland) for not having rail connections. In Oakland the rail connector cost about half a billion dollars and required undoing a bunch of landscaping and road improvements. In the context of Berlin where you're talking about the Brandenberg airport being over budget and oft delayed, I simply don't see Tegel's transit connections as being shameful (or particularly bad).
And that extra ticket costs what, €3.50? The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.
For a single trip ticket, that sounds about right. If you're going to take any other trips that day a day ticket makes more sense and I think the difference is a bit larger.
The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.
The TXL bus takes about twenty minutes from the Hauptbahnhof, and Alexanderplatz is three stops away on the S-Bahn (saving about ten minutes). Transiting to/from the Hbf gives you some extra transit connections as well. And as an added bonus, the TXL bus pretty much drops you at the gate.
Last time in Tegel my flight was an hour and a half late because there were insufficient personnel assigned to passport control causing half of the passengers to miss the boarding time. Not fun standing in a line 100% certain you're missing your flight because there's just one guy checking all the passports.
Instead of using some sort of announcement system employees would just yell at people at German, so once I had to yell back at them to speak English.
Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.
My Tegel story: Just landed after the last leg of my trip (originating from western Canada) waiting for luggage. Time passes. People start to become visibly annoyed. More time passes. Still no luggage. The next plane starts disembarking. Still no luggage. People beginning to get heated, lots of angry german being tossed around.
It turns out the airport hadn’t assigned a crew to unload the plane, and Lufthansa sent an entire plane’s worth of checked luggage to Reykjavik. Cue the whole plane having to be processed through lost luggage. That’s was a long day.
I am traveling in Eastern Europe right now and I have definitely seen instances in airports where both the airport personnel and the the traveler were obviously not native English speakers however English was the only way they could communicate. It seems that English is the international language of air travel. At least for now.
Given that most European countries all speak different native languages but also speak widespread English as a common, second language, it seems a reasonable thing to request in an airport in a European capital where there are likely travelers from many different, non-German speaking countries.
> Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.
It's among the worst airports, but still my favourite. Super fast public transport from center, with a cheap ticket, and fast security throughput. I need to reserve much less extra time for Tegel than any other airport, and side expenses never exceed the price of the flight itself (which can easily happen at many other European airports).
I flew from and to Tegel once or twice per week on average last year. I find Tegel to actually be quite ok. Getting there on the TXL is quite convenient from many places in the city, and most importantly doesn't take very long (as opposed to Schönefeld/BER, which is rather far out). The interior could use a remodeling, but the layout is convenient because it has a security checkpoint per gate. I'm sure that is more expensive to operate than the single checkpoint per terminal model that is common these days, but it is quite efficient for getting to your gate.
Depends where in the city you need to go to. Ostbahnhof to Schönefeld is 16 minutes with the RB 14, 17 minutes with the RE 7. A vastly better experience than the TXL bus which is often crowded.
Surely the bus named after the airport will continue to run to the airport? I think it will no longer go up to Alexanderplatz, and instead end at Hauptbahnhof.
> and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially)
This is false. Both are accessible with a trip on the metro U7 (which cuts the entire city NW<>SE) plus a tiny/short (depending on the airport) bus trip.
We're talking about 30/45 minutes, the large part of whom is on a very frequent metro line. By airport connection standards, this is very convenient (besides being cheap).
> awful, way over capacity, bad facilities
"awful" doesn't mean anything in this context.
Capacity is not so immediate to assess. While terminal C has a standard structure with two security checkpoints, terminal A has checkin and gates directly connected, which makes them very efficient (checkin queues develop in a corridor, essentially, but due to the checkin/gate efficiency, they don't last long).
Facilities are not "bad" - they're not modern, which is different (ie. computing stations). This is obviously a pain for people who need to be plugged 24/7 to a socket, but there's plenty of airports with an old structure.
I'd say it's fair to call the transit situation at Tegel inconvenient. You have to figure out what bus to get on, buy a ticket, haul your luggage onto a bus, haul it off, get off the bus, then walk outside and down to the subway platform. This takes 20 minutes and is uncomfortable. If the U7 went to Tegel as was planned, you'd just take the escalator to the subway platform and get on in the direction towards the city.
If you take a taxi or rent a car to Tegel, it's extremely convenient.
This is obviously subjective and just my opinion, but let me add more depth to justify why I hold that opinion a bit more.
Facilities-wise I was talking about lack of seats, lack of spacious and modern and frankly sometimes clean bathrooms, lack of sufficient staff doing things like passport checking and security, lack of physical space for movement of people through the airport, lack of food/drink and shopping quality and variety, particularly past security. All of these apply to both, with Schonefeld being noticeably worse on every point.
Capacity - All I can say is that at both, there are slow-moving queues of people at gates that restrict the movement of people trying to get to other gates. There is more throughput of people now than the airports were designed for - they're tautologically over capacity - if they weren't then this wouldn't happen, as it doesn't at most other airports.
Public transport - this one's subjective and depends on usecase, and I'm not claiming it's terrible. It works, and sure it's relatively quick. But it's exactly those connections (from Tegel) that bring the inconvenience for two reasons - the first is that it's more difficult to navigate to the center having to make connections if you don't know the system (i.e. for tourists). The second is if you have heavy luggage - it's really not convenient at all to lug bags onto and off of connections, especially buses. If you're a local who knows the networks and you're doing a short flight with hand luggage, I agree that in that usecase it's fine.
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A bit meta now: I think it's amazing and I'm genuinely pleased to see that you're not only disagreeing with my opinions, but coming to the defence of these airports and outwardly saying they're really good, along with other commenters. I worded my original comment quite strongly and matter-of-factly because I honestly thought that 'everyone' would hold broadly the same views. Anecdotally, I've never talked to anyone living in Berlin who disagreed with me on any of this, and I've never imagined whilst being in either of these airports that anyone else there could be thinking 'this is great'. I'm amazed to see how wrong I was, and I love to be exposed to the breadth of opinions that exist out there, through forums like HN, just because the scale of the internet allows them to surface. Always love to have a good debate about such things, it makes me remember the counter points I'm overlooking and/or discover new ones and rethink my original opinions a bit.
I'm not much for travelling, but Tegel is one of few destinations I look forward to.
It sure feels like a bygone era. A luxury in the small. Like cheating out on all the hateful things about flying. Exit the gates and enter the city.
It's understandable that it won't last, but until then anyone can get a taste of how convenient flying must have seemed when you weren't shuttled out to a remote location and held for hours in a Gibsonian dystopia without the tech until finally left to move on.
Unless you’re coming in from outside Schengen (annoyingly, due to the Common Travel Area, Ireland is outside Schengen). Last time I was there, there was exactly one person at passport control; took about an hour to get through.
Berlin is different from other European capitals in that it is the political and cultural center of the country, but not economically. It is also surrounded by low-density countryside, and located nowhere close to the geographic middle of the country.
As a result, air traffic is somewhat low with about 33 million passenger p.a. Heathrow alone gets almost three times as much.
The reason for having two (and, previously, three) smaller airports instead of a single, large one are obviously historical: both East and West Berlin each needed their own. In those times, traffic was even lower because few people in the East ever got to fly, West Berlin had basically no industry or business that was not exclusively local, and the population of West Berlin tended to be somewhat poorer as well.
Berlin is not the only case of the political center of a country but not economically: see Milan vs Rome, Barcelona vs Madrid, New York/San Francisco/etc vs Washington
Sydney vs Canberra, Zurich vs Bern, Amsterdam vs The Hague, Istanbul vs Ankara, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) vs Hanoi, São Paulo vs Brasilia, Ottawa vs Toronto, Beijing vs Shanghai, New Delhi vs Mumbai, Wellington vs Auckland, ...
Rome has the same problems with Ciampino airport. It's exclusively used for budget airlines, and although it's closer to the city center there is no public transit link. You can either take the privately run air coach which takes forever (if the bus departs on time it should take 40 minutes, but late at night or early morning it's usually late taking double that or more) or cough up for a taxi and hope they don't rip you off (the fixed price only applies within the historic city walls, if you are going outside they will charge you more, even if it's less distance).
When I was living there I'd always try to fly to Fiumicino because of that. I can't imagine what impression it must give to tourists on their first trip to the city.
I’ve made 17 total flights in and out of TXL and SXF in the last 12 months, and while I agree that SXF is terrible (it reminds me of Nairobi airport), I like TXL. I prefer both TXL and SXF to London Luton, and TXL alone to London Gatwick, London Heathrow, and London Stansted. I find TXL about equal to London City.
Hate to do this, but having lived in Berlin for over a decade and flown out of more than half the major airports on Earth, Tegel is awesome and more airports should be like it.
I strongly agree, and what's more I have heard more than once of firms choosing to establish a European base in Lisbon over Berlin simply because of the airport connections.
Whilst we're ragging on Schönefeld, my least favourite part is having to walk through burger king to get to the departure gates.
That's curious, here in Lisbon we're constantly talking about the insufficiency of our airport, and making plans for an extra (with a good chance it'll harm a protected natural landscape).
> To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there.
This is part of Berlin's unique culture, though, isn't it? Usually, the capital cities aren't also average to below average in living costs, which Berlin is. Berlin isn't convenient, Berlin is dirty, raw and cheap.
Sure, Berlin used to be crazy cheap, now it's just cheap. Rents are increasing, but that's happening everywhere. For large cities, Berlin is still the least expensive (compared to Western Germany, Eastern Germany is a different thing), by far. If you're looking at Hamburg, or worse, Munich, be prepared to pay two or three times the rent.
It's been my impression from the two or three times a year that I'm in Berlin for a few days that it just works very differently, there's a trade-off between cost of living vs convenience that people accept when they move to Berlin. It's dirtier, a bus or train may just break down, people are generally a bit more rowdy, and you don't expect much from the administration, but then again: you pay a lot less, so it's worth it, like a hostel compared to a hotel.
Berlin is quite a unique capital in that it's relatively poor and contributes relatively little to the national economy. Apart from its size warranting certain infrastructure with sufficient capacity, it'd be surprising if it had much better infrastructure than it does. Its economy doesn't easily allow it.
I disagree with this pretty firmly, I'm afraid :-)
Berlin can be cheap relative to other capitals (though this is getting less true) but the extent to which that's the case depends on your personal choices.
Public infrastructure is another matter because it serves everyone and everyone contributes - there needs to be a minimum bar. And yes, if I pay the same taxes as everyone else, I want a comparable level of service and convenience in my infrastructure to what people in the other cities get.
I meant "cheap" compared to other German cities. No matter what your personal preference is, you'll pay significantly less in Berlin than you would in Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt etc, regarding rent, but also things like eating out at a restaurant.
The taxes aren't the same as well - local infrastructure isn't a federal issue, so federal income tax doesn't pay for that. Berlin's tax factor for companies (a major part of local taxes) is 410%, compared to Hamburg's 470%, Munich's 490% or Cologne's 475%. Berliners have decided to go with lower taxes to attract companies away from other cities, so Berlin has less money to spend on public infrastructure, even though Berlin gets a lot of subsidies from other states (2-3bn/year).
That's very interesting, thanks, I didn't realise that was the case with the taxes. I assumed that some percentage of each person's personal income tax would end up being spent on infrastructure - I actually find it hard to believe it's not, i.e. that it all comes from tax on businesses, but if what you say is the case that does make it feel a little less unfair.
Agreed entirely. I think there are about 4 electrical outlets for customers in the entirety of SXF. Also, the train station is nowhere near the airport, especially for the RB9 express train which is the furthest platform.
It's really the worst airport I've been to and as you say makes the whole situation a lot worse.
If I may take an opinion on this having lived in Berlin for 2 years, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this is that this new airport isn't just like a better, fancier one that'll replace an already adequate airport(s) - Berlin's existing airports (Tegel the 'main' one and Schonefeld the secondary) are, to put it mildly, an embarrassment for the captial city of Europe's biggest economy.
As an American I rather liked Tegel (and the cute little I [hexagon] TXL bumper stickers I'd see periodically). It's small, and I imagine when things go wrong they'll go really wrong. Although I'm somewhat used to that at SFO with the fog, I'm glad I missed the German Air Force crash at SXF by a day or two since everything to diverted to TXL. Compared to London City there was dramatically less walking at Tegel and the public transit connections were better. While London transit will accept NFC payments, Berlin requires an app (albeit one of the best transit apps I've used).
The only airport that I've visited that really stood out as being awful was Amsterdam. It took about three miles of walking to get to the gate (from the "airport" Hilton), there was absolute chaos between the security checkpoint and passport control (wall to wall passengers, no indication where the lines started or ended, no airport staff, etc), and Americans flying Delta (but not KLM) get singled out for extra interrogation at the gate. God forbid you want to buy a train ticket.
To all the mentioned faults I would also add that most of Schönefeld has serious accessibility issues. I've seen a few times people with disabilities completely at a loss. And both airports have problems with staff being rude.
They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these.
It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first).
To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.