Abu Dhabi Airport

Would not recommend flying through this airport mainly due to lack of appropriate seating in at this airport including the business and first class lounges. Both the lounges were dirty and unkempt.

Terrible place considering the vast construction going on you would think it would be in order to provide a few seats for passengers to sit on. Information wise one hand does not seem to know what the other is doing. Gates change frequently and you need to be vigilant or you could easily miss a flight. T1 seating completely inadequate. Flight info boards not very prominent in such a crowded lounge and hard as it is to believe of the five international clocks the Abu Dhabi one was stopped. Gate 5 at T1 for Manila bound passengers is disgraceful. You have to sit on the floor then when the scanning starts everyone is herded into a small lounge which has space for about 80 people with half that amount of seating. Not very comfortable for the compliment of a 777.

I had a stopover at this airport of 8 hours. It was so cold. Everyone was freezing. Airports should have normal temperatures! The 8 hours I spent there were horrible. Abu Dhabi airports expectation of peoples cold weather tolerance is pretty high.

One of the worst airports I have ever had the misfortune to visit. It is simply chaotic a shambles. Staff running around with pieces of scruffy paper which apparently give aircraft arrival and departure times as the electronic boards were just plain wrong. Example 4th April Manchester flight signed as gate 51 - when you arrived there a man with a scruffy piece of paper said "No now gate 29". The food facilities and seating were of a very poor standard - it really is a third rate airport and that is being generous. Because of this I shall never fly Etihad again except I do have a return in July unfortunately.

Clear signage - was transferring from T1 to T3. Long walk but easy to find way and not too crowded. Security lines short and simple. Most of T3 seems to be focused on shopping. waiting area once at the gate spacious but no toilet facilities one you have entered these areas and had passport and ticket checked so do that before you get to gate. Seating area outside of gates limited. Facilities seemed clean and bright. Ground staff can be surly and not very competent and boarding procedures rather chaotic - no plan to board plane - just a dash to the plane!

Abu Dhabi terminal 3 departure area is no bigger than a small shopping centre and does not have sufficient seating or toilet facilities for the hundreds of passengers who pass through and in the case of a recent flight which was delayed 36 hours it proved to be totally inadequate. We had a limited choice of food with only half of the vendors accepting the boarding passes for compensatory meals. Queues built up to almost half an hour waiting for some people many of whom had children. Anyone has had the misfortune to visit Abu Dhabi international terminal 1 they would know that it is a small cramped dirty and very unorganised place. There are insufficient chairs and dozens of passengers were sitting around the floor in corridors and food spillage was evident everywhere even after I motioned to a cleaner. Toilets are unclean and insufficient for the number of passengers. Abu Dhabi airport does look very impressive from the outside the duty free/shopping area looks smart and there is a good deal of high tech equipment but that's where it ends: it is small and cramped the staff are either incompetent or more likely badly trained by Etihad Airways communication with passengers is abysmal - PA announcements are limited and the display boards are very inaccurate. The Abu Dhabi Airport website is inaccurate and not kept up to date. Catering facilities would make a small village shopping centre look impressive - and they do not cater for either the volume of passengers or offer them much by way of choices; the idea of queuing in order to get into a departure gate lounge is pathetic at the least and our case they made passengers queue for over an hour just to get to this point. Overall rating - pathetic.

Transited twice recently through this Airport and on the first occasion it was a nightmare. I had been through once before luckily because you land at the old Terminal 1 something nobody tells you and have to find the small signs directing you to Terminal 3. It's not easy to find through the various food outlets etc. You enter what seems like the entrance to a very large Tube Station and following the signs for about twenty minutes however we had to queue for about 90 minutes to get through security for entrance to the gates in T3. A complete nightmare with large groups of travellers milling around and making no progress whatsoever. The security gates in chaos with the personnel shouting pushing getting passengers to take off belts shoes etc. If your lucky enough to survive this you enter the shopping area. Small compared with Dubai. There are not enough seats and gates often have wrong information at the entrance plus be aware that the gates from 28/32 means that you will have a transit to your aircraft by bus. No enough seats toilets difficult to find and departure boards showing wrong gates. In short a total mess I wont ever be flying Etihad or transiting through AD again.

This is really 2 airports connected by a long walk. The new terminal (3) is fairly modern but very bad and the old terminal (1) is awful. In T1 you have to queue past individualized security checkpoints into overcrowded waiting area pods. Sometimes several planes are leaving from the same pod and it can be incredibly chaotic. There is nowhere near enough seating. The food and shopping are ok for a small domestic airport bu not for an international hub. Judging by its looks Terminal 3 should be very nice but it has a lot of problems. You have to walk through duty free to get to gates and it is a congested maze. It is a 10-15 minute walk from the security point to the gates where the Etihad planes depart and they announce boarding long before boarding actually starts. Because of extra security there is not enough seating in the gate area for all the passengers so if you answer the boarding call you can find yourself sitting for 30-40 minutes waiting in an outer lounge for the gate lounge to empty so that you can get through security and onto the plane. If you're flying business class forget getting on early unless you like to push people over. Etihad staff work extremely hard to make the situation tolerable and AUH staff are very considerate and helpful. It seems that the design and management of this place make this a most undesirable place to transfer. Etihad's lounges are fair at best but way undersized for the traffic. Sometimes I have had to push my way in to get a chair. On the plus side Immigration Customs and Security staff have always been pleasant.

I've been through both Abu Dhabi and Dubai a few times. Etihad and Emirates as airlines provide nice services but I'd avoid Abu Dhabi airport if I had the choice. The airport is obviously striving for an upmarket feel but it's quite cramped the organisation and staff are somewhat lacking there's few opportunities for rest fresh air or natural light. The variety of food and facilities on offer is pretty limited too.

This is a new airport and its got to be the worst airport I have used it took almost 2 hours to get from our arrival gate to our new departure gate. The staff have no interest in helping you. How this airport works I have no idea its total chaos there is no organisation here. I will use Dubai or Doha in future.