Heathrow

• Cluttered and claustrophobic terminals (maybe not T4)
• Confusing layouts with a lack of clear signs
• Dirty and poorly maintained
• My aircraft gate is always about 1 mile from immigration
• Long long taxiing
• Long delays to take off
• Long delays to land
• A place the size of a city with nowhere decent to eat
• More unlicensed taxi touts than a third world airport
• A relatively new train service (Heathrow Express) that is awkward to get to
• People barking orders at you to take this or that bottle from your luggage
• Lack of clear instructions about what must or must not go through the X ray machines
• T3 departure lounge seems without any natural light, no windows, just a clutter of seats surrounded by staggeringly expensive shops
• A new one way system in T3 that means if you walk to the wrong gate you have to requeue through security to get to the correct gate.
• Rather than giving people space they given them shops
• Going up stairs only to walk for a minute and then go down stairs
• Long delays for your luggage around poorly laid out luggage carousels

And out of this world pricing

• The Price of the Airport Hotels (�220 for the 3* Holiday Inn last week)
• The food at airport hotels (�19 for a carvery that featured 2 veg!)
• �8 to take the hotel shuttle buses to and from the airport
• The Heathrow express - �14.50 each way for a 15 mins trip to Paddington, which is very difficult to connect to other London railway terminals
• Duty Free prices that are hardly bargains
• The price of the short and long stay car parking

Wow that feels better, now I've got that off my chest

I had the "buffet" once at the moathouse or boathouse or something along those lines out at LGW. It was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen after prepaying for the meal I went back and told them they could keep the money I had lost my appetite

Agree with LHR - worst airport I have the displeasure of using. A few more:

• Toilets either closed for cleaning or open and dirty
• Sneering check-in staff - especially if you are politically-incorrect enough to hold a C ticket, flash a gold card or just look like a business man
• Having to pay for wireless LAN in "executive" lounges
• Fast track security that isn't
• Arriving as a non-EU citizen and being treated like cattle
• Smelly and unwashed non-pax seeing-off or meeting their equally smelly and unwashed next of kin. (Especially around the entrance to security in T3 deps.)
• Moving walkways that don't - but you walk onto them anyway wondering if some clever sensor might set it going. Of course.. you should have known better. But you carry on... "stiff upper lift chaps, this is England"
• Ceiling panels that are missing, light bulbs dangling from threads, and patronising posters spouting how BAA are investing millions on improving things
• Never enough staff at the underground station to help happless visitors who had the audacity to arrive in the UK without enough coins to feed into ticket machines that are displaying "EXACT FARE ONLY" because staff were to lazy to maintain them.

I despise Heathrow with a passion. I get anxiety just thinking about how I'm going get there and whether I'll be late.

Carpets, carpets, carpets. Why on earth use carpets in such heavily transited areas? They are going to look worn and dirty after a few weeks.

Lack of security scanners. I'm sorry, but T3 having only 2 scanners open (including fast track) on a Monday morning peak is an unfunny joke.

The constant hard sell. No, don't send me on a massive detour through the duty free shop, I DON'T WANT TO BUY ANYTHING.

And then, when you actually do need to buy something for that horrible 0630 flights, the shops aren't even open.

But worst of all, it seems apparent that T5 really won't be any better. Public transport was supposed to be the primary mode of access to T5. So, what do we have? A branch line of an expensive single-destination, overpriced dedicated service, and a complex destination-switching arrangement of a painfully slow, overcrowded underground service. Are they easy to get to? No, they're miles from the arrivals gates. The roads are accessible, of course. If they were serious about public transport, it would be immediately outside the arrivals hall, just like HKG. And then, if you have the temerity to want to go somewhere other than London... Integrated transport, my left buttock.

T5 will be as bad as the others, only slightly more spangly. I give 3 months before half the travelators are broken, and the carefully planned 'passenger flows' from area to area are blocked by loads of shops that you have no choice but to walk through.

I have no idea why we persist with keeping LHR as anything but a regional airport. And yet airlines are clamouring to get there, well above the other London airports. Why? Are people really that wedded to the idea of getting a car to/from the airport? It's quite sad.

Oh yes, I totally agree with that one!

And BAA, I believe, are trying to charge us more to use this dump!

They should knock the whole place down and start again

I don't even find Heathrow that Easy to drive to. I've driven from the Parking Express depot dozens of times and still almost always get on the wrong road.

Any hassle on the M4 and it just makes getting to and from the airport a nightmare. Oh and there are roadworks on the airport approach at the moment.

As for the Heathrow Express, Why Paddington? It serves the lines out to the West - save your money (and time) and get the bus to Reading and pick your train up from there! They should have engineered it either to the city centre or Euston or Kings Cross for connections to the Midlands and North of England.

A little bit of imagination, I don't know what they could have done. If Crossrail had got off the ground sooner, it could have run through to the East. Maybe they could have had it join the H&C line at Paddington and run through to Euston, King's Cross and Liverpool St (those tunnels are full gauge). Maybe they could have diverted the entire GWR route to call at Heathrow, like they did at Schiphol, Zurich, Frankfurt... Maybe they could have made the junction capable of running trains through to Reading. Maybe they could have extended the tunnel to meet the SWT lines at Feltham.

But they didn't.

Maybe if they'd built a decent high-speed line (Gardermoen or KUL style) out to STN, instead of letting it languish for years before the LCCs moved in en masse. Imagine, a full, modern, Norman Foster designed airport just 15 minutes from the heart of the City! But no...

I recall spending an hour on the slip road between the M25 and the M4 because of the volume of traffic, so IMO, unless you're actually in London, Heathrow is a nightmare to get to.

;

I think the bottom line is that all of this would be tolerable if the cost of transiting through Heathrow were reasonable. For the amount of money they rake in, it is not tolerable. (applies to many things in the UK in general too...) You know, you will put up with a certain amount of inconvenience or let things slide in less developed countries, because it's dirt cheap! Here is the worst of both worlds.

I agree that the number of T3 security checkpoints is nowhere near enough for the amount of traffic. It is ridiculous and the result of BAA administration saving a buck.

another example:

4 pound bus fare just to get to your on-airport hotel. And these are $hitty, $hitty buses. What a ripoff. And you have no choice because they make all hotels use the same goddamm bus. They call it the Hotel Hoppa -- makes it sounds fun, easy, and cheap. Which is the exact opposite of what it is. Sorry, this is one of the things that really riles me up about LHR and is a reflection of how the whole country is, to me, whether that sounds a little extreme or not, that's what I see!

One tip:
next time I go to LHR, I'm going to try the Heathrow Connect train instead of Heathrow Express. They purposely don't want you taking it, because it costs half as much (7 pounds vs 14.5 pounds). As a tradeoff, it runs half as frequently (every 30 min), and takes 10 minutes longer (25 min vs. 15 min), but I'm willing to do that. They purposely show it as "Hayes" services "Stopping to Heathrow" as a footnote. Nice way to force people into taking the faster, more expensive service!
see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathrow_Connect

Thank goodness I only ever transit through LHR and much prefer AMS for this purpose. On the one occasion I've had to actually check in there (by walking from T1 to T3 because the BMI check in agent at MAN was a complete arse who looked on my BD Gold card as the prefect excuse to treat me as "beneath contempt"), it was hell and security took forever.

Yes, the UK's gateway to Europe and beyond is indeed a national disgrace.