CARDIFF AIRPORT review : 5 May 2008 : by Ian Hume

Customer Rating : 2/5

When will this minor provincial airport realise it should have aspirations? As previous posts show, public transport is poor, especially late and early in the day. And it must be one of the few European airports that does not have a taxi rank and where very long waits in a tiny taxi shed are common. The interior is dreary, and the up, down, turn round, down, up of the maze-like entrance from incoming flights is hardly an 'international arrival' experience. I use it because it is close to home, but every journey brings another example of lack of customer focus and management grip. The other morning I was travelling with light hand luggage only, and had printed-off my boarding card from the web. Thus I went straight upstairs to security. "The scanner's not working, you'll have to go back downstairs to check in and get a regular boarding card". That I did, queuing up patiently. Then upstairs again, where a different member of staff remarked "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't". I asked if she could get a supervisor to put up a prominent notice at the foot of the stairs when their only scanner went out of order like this - just so that pax didn't have to go up the stairs only to have to go down again and then up again. This appeared to be a revolutionary idea for Cardiff. Perhaps they can't source a notice board and marker pen - and I'm sure they haven't thought of having two scanners have they? They certainly haven't trained their staff to be resourceful and pro-active.

CARDIFF AIRPORT review : 30 April 2008 : by Bob Alexander

Customer Rating : 2/5

We flew into Cardiff airport on Thursday 24th April intending to get public transport to central Cardiff. We missed the two buses that could have got us there (one direct and one via a rail connection) as they left the stand within a couple of minutes of each other and then we had to wait an hour for the next to arrive although one was scheduled to have arrived after about 45 minutes, it did turn up but having dropped passengers off it drove away without picking up the waiting passengers. This was at 5pm so hardly an off-peak period!! We returned to the airport on Monday 28th April to fly to Malaga. It took us an hour to check in with bmibaby, although there were only about a dozen people in the queue ahead of us. When we got to the desk we were a kilo overweight so we removed a bag of magazines from our suitcase and put it in our cabin bag which was almost empty. This put us below 20 kilos but the girl did not seem too happy at what we had done and insisted that we put the cabin bag in a measuring cradle, even though it was a regulation size airline cabin bag. It fitted easily, needless to say. Was she resentful at not being able to charge us excess baggage? We have travelled dozens of times all over the world with that bag and never been asked to prove its measurements before. Then it was the turn of the security check into departures. One desk open, a large queue of people and further delays. We and others expressed our annoyance at the fact that there were 11 other security staff just hanging about chatting to each other. To add further insult to passengers some 'staff' who had been waiting to clear security were called forward and given priority over paying customers! The general facilities of the airport seem good but clearly there is a major management problem which causes problems for passengers and probably results in loss of revenue for airport shops/cafes etc. as passengers spend so much time in queues they have little time left for anything else.

Cardiff Airport review by C Wyatt

4 October 2007   Customer Rating :

We use Cardiff Airport because it is close to where we live in Penarth. We recently returned at around 10.30pm from Cologne airport via Amsterdam Schipol. Now I know both of these cities are much more important than Cardiff but I was frankly astonished at the taxi service offered outside the main Arrivals hall. This is operated from a small, rather scruffy shed and appeared to consist of about three cars in total. The staff were efficient and friendly and the taxis themselves were clean and comfortable but really, for an airport serving the capital city of Wales this is just not good enough. Other passengers from our plane seemed quite bewildered by it all and I was acutely embarrassed to hear conversations between them in which they were saying "Is this really how taxis are arranged in Wales?". I know that Cardiff airport has been gradually improving its facilities, although frankly the wildly over-the-top response to increasing security by keeping all cars so far away from the terminal building hasn't helped at all. But these improvements are wasted when one of the first and most important impressions visitors get of our city is a long wait outside a tatty shed for a £20plus taxi ride to the city centre.

Cardiff Airport review by Richard Kors

15 August 2007   Customer Rating :

A small airport with a customer service orientated atmosphere. I use mostly KLM and bmi baby and most these flights are on time and a short walk from the terminal building to the aircraft. The security never seems to take longer than 10 minutes to get through and new lounge area is great. Arriving is bliss, you get off the plane, immigration about 5 minutes to get through. When I compare this to using Bristol or Heathrow, I prefer the benefits of using a small airport for my travel.

Cardiff Airport review by Sandie Reed

27 October 2006   Customer Rating : n/a

Cardiff’s title of “Cardiff International Airport is surely a wistful hope which ignores the tatty reality. There are no toilets in arrivals so you have to go right back into the check-in area – just the ticket after a long flight. I fly there on BMI Baby from Edinburgh a few times a year. The first time I flew back from Cardiff was a Sunday, when I fell foul of the poor transport communications with the city and had to get a taxi. Security are at least cheerful and efficient, frequently spotting things which go unnoticed at the Edinburgh end. The airport facilities are wretched, particularly if your flight is delayed. On the check-in side there is nothing but overpriced junk food and a sleazy amusement arcade as well as a limited paper shop. Once past security, it gets worse. There is no plane viewing area unless you want to sit in a noisy, dirty, tacky bar bellowing trashy music. There is another sleazy “amusement” arcade but nowhere to get a meal. There is a pseudo-Italian coffee bar with a limited range of unappetising, stale, very expensive, fatty snacks. Sandwiches on sale there and at the paper shop usually contain industrial mayonnaise and are mostly a no-go area for vegetarians or anyone with an egg allergy. The shops don’t even sell Welsh water. The souvenirs of Wales in the gift shops tend not to be of Welsh manufacture and are tacky in the extreme. They used to have opinion forms there, which never ever got responded to but they have stopped all that – presumably because the person who read them got taken away with terminal depression. This airport should be a gateway to Wales. Cardiff Airport makes me embarrassed to be of Welsh heritage. Avoid it if you can.

Cardiff Airport review by Ian Hume

10 October 2006

I use CWL because it is near to home. I can think of no other reason to do so. As previous posters testify, public transport is poor; taxis are impossible. The last time I took a train from here, by the time it reached Cardiff it had 170 (yes, one hundred and seventy) standing passengers in a two car unit . The bus timetable in the solitary shelter at the terminal is incorrect. To depart - or on arrival - there is a succession of up, down, down up steps, narrow corridors and corporate grime everywhere. Immigration has two queues - one for non-EU, but this is not signed in any language. In a bilingual society, the Airport which claims to be Cardiff WALES is completely monolingual in its services, advertising and signage. Toilets are often dire. Clearly this airport is managed for profit and not for people.

Cardiff Airport review by John Fricker

22 September 2006

Once an hour just isn't good enough for the poorly promoted airport rail service to and from Rhoose, but the fares (e.g. £4.50 return to Pontypridd) are a good deal. Why do trains that could serve the airport terminate at Barry , one stop short of Rhoose? The timetable at the airport bus stop fails to provide details of the free service or any other services to Rhoose. It's as if Arriva would rather not be running the service. The evening meal I had at the airport was dire. The sausages had been kept warm for far too long and the chips had a strange consistency. They weren't cheap either. If I hadn't been so hungry, I would have taken them back. Overall, I did not enjoy using this airport.

Cardiff Airport review by Jackie Cornwall

6 September 2006

Cardiff is not too bad to fly out of, but a disaster to come back to. Currently, incoming passengers have to file through a labyrinth of breeze-block passages (like being evacuated through the service area) with crummy amateurish paintings on the walls, queue in a 2-channel passport check and then grapple with a stop-start baggage reclaim. When you get out into the wind-swept landscape, surly bus drivers announce with pride that they aren't going back to Cardiff for another hour. Or struggle down a wooden ramp and confront the supercilious woman in the taxi-office who, if she can be bothered to look up from her computer screen, will inform you (in her own time) that there is a half hour wait for a taxi, which will have to be ordered. Unbelievably, this is the only taxi company allowed to operate from the airport - taxis dropping off passengers are not allowed to pick up! Thus we see an almost unique -in-the-world airport where you can't walk out of the terminal and into a taxi.

Cardiff Airport review by John Herbert

24 June 2006

Once you leave the immediate airport area, there are NO signs to the M4 until you get to the roundabout where HTV Wales used to be. There is every opportunity at traffic lights and other turning to end up in the centre of Barry rather than getting to the Motorway. For goodness sake Cardiff Airport wake up, you want the English in your catchment area to swell your passenger numbers - at least show us the way to get home . And yes, I did have a pleasant detour trip through Barry !

Cardiff Airport review by Derek Davies

1 June 2006

I arrived back to CWL at 12.30 am. from my holiday. There were 2 other flights that had just landed. There we only 2 carousels for baggage and neither of them indicated which baggage was being unloaded. There was chaos, as people who didn't know which one contained their luggage struggled to get past those who had retrieved theirs. There was only one ladies toilet in use as the others were flooded. The few staff who were there were also confused as to where the luggage was coming from. An hour later we exit Cardiff Wales International Airport (surely a joke!) and spend another 30 mins until we reach the M4 motorway. So much for the article in the Western Mail's "Business Wales" entitled - "Flight of Fancy" . Obviously the ambitious plans and £100m investment have a long way to go before any sensible person would consider using Cardiff Wales Airport .

Cardiff Airport review by James Crichton

15 May 2006

Having used Cardiff airport for the first time, I have to say I was very unimpressed with the airport or transport links to and from Cardiff. The departure lounge at Cardiff was small and had a very unpleasant odour due to the poor ventilation from the couple of food outlets in the lounge. I don't particularly like smelling badly fried food for a couple of hours whilst waiting for my flights.At the gate there were no seats so you had to stand. The transport links to Cardiff were very poor, only once and hour on a Sunday both by train and bus from the city centre. This seems to be an airport living in the 60's whilst most other airports are at least attempting to give passengers what they need in a modern world. If you have a choice, fly from Bristol.

Cardiff Airport review by Ian Hume

15 May 2006

Transport to and from this airport is not fitting for a regional airport. Sadly the express bus is now replaced by a limited stop service that will no longer call at city centre hotels. The timetable can be found at http://www.cardiffbus.com/services/timetables/TIMES/MF/X 91MF.HTML Beware also that there are now few buses early or late in the day. The rail service remains only hourly, with overcrowding and delays a factor. Taxis are very hard to obtain in the late evenings, with no adequate waiting facility. Recently I had a full hour's wait for a local taxi journey for which there was no public transport alternative. Does the management of this airport care for anyone other than the car owner?

Cardiff Airport review by Howard Bartlett

12 August 2005

Rail Link v Bus. The Express Bus takes 30 minutes the train takes 45 and stops at six or seven stations before the airport. I tried it recently, and found there is very little room for luggage on the train yet plenty of room on the bus. They have extended the bus times to match those of the train last bus c.23.30. I know what I'll be using.

Cardiff Airport review by Augur Pearce

3 August 2005

Don't knock the Rhoose rail-air link. If your destination doesn't happen to be the unsalubrious precincts of Cardiff Central Station, but some other part of Glamorgan, it's quite likely that the Bridgend-Merthyr trains serving Rhoose will take you direct to your goal, and for a fraction of the cost that the Airbus will charge merely to deposit you in the town centre. I paid about £2-80 single to Llandaf, while it would have cost me a fiver to take the Airbus.

Cardiff Airport review by Ian Hume

19 June 2005

Don't trust the new rail link to Cardiff. It runs only every hour and it would take just one train cancellation to ruin your day. There is a connecting bus to the rail halt, but the station is windswept and has no facilities at all. As other correspondents say, the bus is fine & calls near all major hotels in Cardiff as well as at the main Cardiff rail station. One further drawback is that you cannot pick up a taxi at the airport main entrance - you have to take a sloping uncovered walkway to a hut to order a cab which at peak times may take some time to arrive. Note that the business lounge has just about the poorest selection of alcohol of any UK lounge - but nice staff.

Cardiff Airport review by Nick Tagg

18 May 2005

Top rate! Quick check in, friendly and efficient staff. After being forced to use Heathrow, Gatwick & Bristol its good to see that the range of services using this airport has at last started to grow. Another plus is that good quality low cost carriers such as BMIBaby and Air Wales are now starting to expand - watch out Easyjet and Bristol Airport life may well start to become a lot more difficult for them.

Cardiff Airport review by Howard Bartlett

1 April 2005

I caught the airport shuttle bus from the centre of Cardiff ,an excellent service which runs every 30 minutes. However the absolute last bus to leave the airport is 21.30. To late if your flight arrives after this time. Otherwise an expensive 22-25 pounds taxi ride. There is a rail link being opened soon, I doubt if this will run any later.

Cardiff Airport review by Ben Weston

11 March 2005

My favourite thing about Cardiff is the lack of queues. Check in takes just a few moments, and you're in. Similarly security only takes a minute or two, and a flight to Amsterdam and the rest of the world that KLM connects to is a fifty five minute hop. After a drink and a sandwich, and a browse of the newspaper, you're there. Compare this to travelling with BA and you have a two hour minimum journey down the M4, the Severn Bridge toll, expensive car parking at Heathrow and then the long and tiring queues to check in and get through security. Forget Cardiff's slightly tacky 'charter airport' feel, it saves you a world of hassle and stress.

Cardiff Airport review by Luke Rogers

7 January 2005

No rail access. Road access, fair to middling. Car parking, pathetic, forcing you half a mile away and to walk back with all of your baggage as the courtesy bus is unavailable / non-existent. Terminal building, pleasant. Want to compete with Bristol, try harder to get the little things right like first impressions.

Cardiff Airport review by Jon Roberts

17 November 2004

I use CWL frequently. I agree that its strong point is on the return journey where luggage is reunited with you very quickly and you are on your way in minutes. The airport owners TBI have invested millions in the airport but have not been supported by local transport companies. Your previous reviewers are correct that the bus service is a joke. The long awaited rail link should improve things for public transport users.

Cardiff Airport review by Chris Newman

26 July 2004

We have used Cardiff a couple of times this past year, on the first occasion we were unable to get anything to eat before our return journey - apart from scampi! It is possible that catering services have now improved due to some promised alterations. But our complaint is not against the airport – it’s the surface transport. Getting to/from Cardiff city by so called airline bus is awful, these are not dedicated buses but in fact are stage carriage services, and despite what they say they do not offer a 30 minute service throughout the day. On our second trip we had to endure a stand-up 67 minute journey in the evening rush hour to the airport. A truly dreadful service – but hopefully things may improve when the passenger rail services are introduced at nearby Roose - providing there’s a shuttle bus between the airport and station.

Cardiff Airport review by Alex Fortune

23 March 2004

Cardiff Airport is an excellent regional airport. You can check in efficiently be upstairs in the cafe area (with a view of the apron and runway) within a few minutes. The real bonus is coming back, as your luggage is normally waiting for you by the time you get to the reclaim area. I think the longest I've ever had to wait to get get my bags, and go through customs is 10 mins - plus within half an hour you can be sitting back at home!

Cardiff Airport review by Anthony Matthews

15 August 2003

I think the review by Alessandro is a bit harsh.I agree that the infrastructure is nowhere near as sophisticated as Heathrow or Gatwick, but Cardiff doesn't pretend to be a major portal. It is a regional airport which serves a particular catchment area. My view is that with the recent extensions to the passenger departure areas the facilities have much improved. The choice of destinations has increased significantly over the past 12 months or so, and I hope will continue to expand. I've been fed up with rip-off airfares by previous monopolies such as British Airways and it's refreshing to see some genuine attempt to bring low cost travel to the region by BMIBaby and Air Wales. Feedback suggests routes are well supported by passengers. A rail link would certainly bring huge benefits and create a faster link to the city centre. I find Cardiff much easier to get to than Bristol and I think that the facilities at Cardiff for waiting passengers perfectly acceptable. I've used the airport 5 times so far this year, and the longest it's taken me to disembark, pick up my baggage, locate my car and then drive off is 15 minutes. You'll never do that at Heathrow or Gatwick!! Cardiff is in my view a very good regional airport.

Cardiff Airport review by Alessandro Severi

21 June 2003

I have flown from Cardiff a number of times and I think that it's not an good airport. The design is ridiculous, the check-in area is very small, and after you check-in you go up to the second floor where you find a few restaurants and a news agent. The departures area is OK although there are no windows to see the airplanes and so when you wait you either read something or you look at the shops. The good thing is that they have fingers or buses and it's very unusual for you to walk to the plane. The communications with Cardiff is simply ridiculous, there is a bus every hour or so with no luggage space! Avoid taking the bus in the peak hours because it's full of people going to or coming from work! The taxis are ok but they cost about 20 pounds to go to Cardiff City Centre and so they are not worth it. I usually leave from Bristol because the airport is better, more airlines land there (in Cardiff you only have Bmibaby, KLM, Ryanair and Air Wales), while in Bristol you have (Air France, Aurigny, British Airways, flybe, Easyjet, Ryanair etc) and communications to the city are much better with 2 big coaches an hour, with tickets that are buyable from National Express, National Rail or on the bus.







 

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