Luton Airport

It makes me ashamed to be British. Flying out of Luton to Germany. Mid term car park - more like a patch of waste ground with a couple of bus stops. Drove around for more than 5 minutes trying to locate a space (there were none where the signs indicated). Terminal full to bursting. No seats. All focus on retail with no thought about passenger convenience. Construction workers all stood around the main airport entrance smoking in front of clearly visible no smoking signs. Arrived back from Dortmund. A 1 hour flight. Not allowed off the plane for 20 minutes - no one to supervise passengers into the terminal was the excuse. The reality I suspect was the huge overloading of immigration. 1 hour to get through immigration, which was chaotic and overcrowded with queue entering from multiple directions. Then another 15 mins wait for the car park bus. Took 1.5 hours to get to my car from landing. Half an hour longer than my flight from Germany. Management should be ashamed to call this an airport - never again Luton.

Luton is the worst airport in the country. Avoid like the plague. They now charge you £2.50 for 10 mins for drop off or pickup. The drop-off area is chaotic. There is an hours queue from the edge of the airport to the terminal. This affects buses and taxis as well. The drop off point has a number of lanes and you stop then pay on exit. It is absolute chaos. Nobody knows where to go. You should park on the left and leave the right lane clear for exit. There are not enough spaces so cars block the lanes to load / unload. Until this airport gets new management, it is not fit for purpose.

Luton airport is the worst I've ever been too. They charge for absolutely everything. £2.50 to be dropped off, that's for 10 mins. Total rip off. Then they charge £1 to weigh your case. £1 for 2 clear plastic bags for the liquids. It's like the Ryanair of airports.

Luton airport has the worst passenger and flight handling standard I have ever experienced. 30+ minutes queue at security, 20+ minutes if you accept a rip off of £5 for a priority lane. Every square metre of the public area is congested, there are long queuing at all outlets, with insufficient seating. Almost all departures are delayed by 30-50 minutes despite incoming flights are landing on or ahead of time. Capacity simply cannot meet demand.

I live within 15 minutes of Luton airport and have chosen to use other airports before this one because, frankly, it is has never been a great experience. I stopped using this airport years ago. However, I was asked by a friend if I would drop him off at the airport because he was catching an early morning flight to Spain. What an awful experience. You would think that at 5am you would experience little queues but due to terrible planning of infrastructure and parking areas - it took ages to reach the overcrowded drop off zone, which charged an exorbitant £2.50 for this 10 minute pleasure. Although we left early, my friend had to rush to the departures and just made his flight. On leaving the airport I could see many people who had got out of cars, walking with their suitcases instead of sitting in the queuing traffic. What a disgrace - whoever is responsible for the debacle of the airport parking - should hang their head in shame. I will stick to Heathrow, which makes Luton look like a bunch of amateurs.

Luton airport has been terrible for some time and it was hard to think how it could get worse but it has. Not only are charges obscene and everywhere, the facilities are awful. It is far too crowded and cannot cope with the number of users. Queues are something the British take for granted but queuing for nearly 2 hours to get through passport control? In what universe is that acceptable? Either pay for more immigration staff or take fewer customers by reducing flight numbers. If the airport are unwilling the CAA should make them until they can improve. Maybe it is part of their ongoing scheme to fleece more cash from their customer parking. Keep people an extra 2 hours and reap the rewards in over-stay charges. I have travelled a bit and rate Luton as the third worst airport I have been through, just ahead of Bulawayo and Juba. After today I rate it worse than Bulawayo. If you can, in any way, avoid using this airport please be kind to yourself and avoid it. Even crawling to your destination over broken glass is better than suffering the neglect, daylight robbery and total lack of care shown by the airport owners and many of the staff.

Luton must rank as one of the worst airports I have ever experienced in 40 years of business travel. The short term parking is congested and impossible to find a space. Then it costs £7.50 for 40 minutes. The arrivals website is hopelessly out of date and inaccurate resulting in waits of 2 hours when you are told to expect flights on time. If you travel through Luton expect to be ripped of for everything. What a shambles but who can expect more when this dump is run by the local authority.

Absolute shambles from beginning to end at Luton Airport. Priority boarding queues are a joke because you can't get down the stairs due to them being blocked with regular flyers. £2.50 just to be dropped off at the airport- maximum 10 minutes allowed so throw your passengers out quick. Huge construction site and been so for so long, they could have rebuilt the place twice. Most staff sour faced and unfriendly- passengers are obviously a nuisance. Not speedy even in Pret. Had to give up waiting to pay for sandwich as queues so long. Airline brought plane in late from previous destination and there was no way it could take off on time. Half an hour late take off. Meanwhile, waiting area crowded and hot, kids crying and people look like fainting. Roads into airport are one big parking lot due to lanes from roundabout going down to one. A mess and no speed resolving the situation. Also, from past flight less than a month ago, really looking forward to the chaos that is called passport / border control on return. Impossible to tell which is fast track / retina scan and regular queue and such a jumble making people irritable and aggressive. Awful airport.

Someone must have thought, wow, I can make some real money here. Lets do it. Any airport, anywhere, has got to be better than this. Its embarassing. Difficult to find somewhere to sit, pay to drop people off, its dirty and chaotic. The place will be used as a magnet for getting us to shop. The 'customer' is not a person any more, but a thing with money.

Utterly appalling at Luton Airport. As someone who works in construction to run an upgrade this badly is shocking. Almost missed my flight due to a mix of poor traffic management and signage. Then at security I had to leave the one item of liquid I had with me because it was not in a bag. Clearly a business which only wants to extract every last penny from its victims. I would not refer to myself as one of their customers.