14 ms·

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 bett

• agumonkey 7y ago
  is this some kind of second system effect ?
• martinald 7y ago
  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.
  • pizza234 7y ago
    > Also, the train station is nowhere near the airport, especially for the RB9 express train which is the furthest platform. It's less than 500m to the terminal A. If one's really bothered by this (d'oh), they can take the U7+bus, which ends in front of terminal A (in addition to being much more frequent).
• phreeza 7y ago
  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.
  • chobeat 7y ago
    beware that the TXL bus is not gonna reach Tegel anymore, they are changing the lines.
    • phreeza 7y ago
      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.
      • chobeat 7y ago
        I understood it differently: it will start in Alex but not go all the way to the airport. Your point makes sense though. It should start in September.
        • phreeza 7y ago
          In german: https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2019/06/bvg-aenderungen-buslinien-august.html https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2019/06/bvg-aenderunge...
    • jashmatthews 7y ago
      I'm fairly sure the TXL bus is just stoppingn at Hauptbahnhof now instead of going all the way to Alexanderplatz.
  • 7y ago
• ThePhysicist 7y ago
  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).
  • rkachowski 7y ago
    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.
    • shaki-dora 7y ago
      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.
      • tilolebo 7y ago
        This is true except for Terminal C, which is indeed a mess. I still like Tegel a lot, as it's very close to the West center of the city.
        • thinkindie 7y ago
          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.
• rkachowski 7y ago
  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.
  • icebraining 7y ago
    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).
• shaki-dora 7y ago
  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.
  • thinkindie 7y ago
    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
    • FabHK 7y ago
      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, ...
    • fyfy18 7y ago
      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.
• rolltiide 7y ago
  Imagine if Frankfurt could have Berlin’s culture Game over
• luckylion 7y ago
  > 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.
  • davnicwil 7y ago
    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.
    • luckylion 7y ago
      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).
      • davnicwil 7y ago
        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.
• pizza234 7y ago
  > 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.
  • davnicwil 7y ago
    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. --- 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.
• sneak 7y ago
  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.
  • kdavis 7y ago
    This!
• inferiorhuman 7y ago
  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.
• gameoflife 7y ago
  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.
  • gmueckl 7y ago
    That rudeness is Berlin for you in a nutshell. A lot of people in this city have a tendency to be loud, direct and terse.
    • type0 7y ago
      Is that a heritage of some kind of cultural trauma caused by the cold war?
• ben_w 7y ago
  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.
• xorcist 7y ago
  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.
  • rsynnott 7y ago
    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.