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Comment by davidkuennen | Hacker News Reader

I was flying to Schiphol on Monday and use that airport as my favorite for long-haul flights, even though I'm from Germany. It's a really nice airport.

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Whenever I travel in a group through Shiphol, at least one piece of luggage gets missing every time. Yes, they manage to get it back to you eventually (although I did lose an expensive pair of running shoes there), but the amount of hoops you have to jump through at times is complete madness. After ten years of going over Shiphol 1-2 per year, I'm now at a point where I just try to find a route around it.

Weird, Schiphol is my least favorite major airport. Poor dining options, for one, but the worst is how narrow the pathways are. If you're trying to pass a gate that's within twenty minutes of the boarding time, you've got to push through a crowd. (And I can't blame the crowd, as there's not nearly enough seating.)

This is when flying Air France/KLM within Europe. Maybe it's better in other terminals.

It's one of my least favorite airports in Europe. The number of times my luggage got lost there alone is enough for me to avoid whenever possible. The shops and restaurants are also extremely bland.

The needed context seems to be that the person you are replying to is German. I don't love Schiphol either, but it beats any German airport (looking at Frankfurt in particular).

What’s a nice large European airport? I feel like I’ve heard terrible things of all of them, like LHR and CDG.

I like Heathrow when travelling to or from London. It's huge, but there's public transport to each terminal, a reasonable selection of restaurants and generally somewhere to sit. It's fairly quiet.

Changing between terminals at Heathrow is much less fun.

CDG I find confusing.

>Changing between terminals at Heathrow is much less fun.

I decided to stay at a Heathrow airport hotel a while back. Turned out I had to change terminals and I'm pretty sure it took me at least as long as getting a shuttle bus to one of the hotels would have taken.

You often have to walk quite a ways too.

Overall though Heathrow is pretty good among the large European airports.

I actually kinda enjoy the distance between terminals. After a long international flight, I deliberately take the tunnel, and skip the moving walkways. As long as I'm not rushing to make a connection, the walk is really nice.

Copenhagen is quite nice.

Except for the incredibly low ceilings in some places.

I would argue that's the only nice airport in Scandinavia even! Would say the worst layout on an airport i've ever seen is Stockholm Arlanda.

Copenhagen airport is my favourite too - note however that Arlanda T5 is being expanded at the moment and it seems like it will be a lot nicer when they're finished. The security stuff is already much better: no need to unpack laptops etc. from hand luggage when going through the new section. T2 is still quite sucky though!

OSL is fine too. And it's not like there's a huge number of large hubs in Scandinavia…

Frankfurt is atrocious, but Munich is great.

> The shops and restaurants are also extremely bland.

Worse than Frankfurt? It seems like the only food you can get there is a hot-dog...

I've several times made it from a hotel room in town to my gate at Schiphol in under an hour. Without trying, and walking/taking the train from central.

Schiphol AMS is my favorite European airport.

It’s not as great as SIN, ICN or the once dominant HKG though.

I hate Schiphol, and my family tend to call it by a name that rhymes.

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