Luton Airport

Dirty and inefficient with rude staff. We queued for one hour to get through security and passport control. Aspire lounge is horrible. Limited food and with a very downmarket feel about the place. Dirty worn out chairs with stains on them. Luton Airport is a crowded grubby and unpleasant place to start any trip.

Luton Airport is a truly awful destination. There is no sense of it being designed for its existing number of passengers. Passport queues are long and sprawling escalators are sometimes shut leaving staircases more fitting to a small terraced house to service 1000s of arrivals. Surely fundamental changes need to take place in advance of the proposed developments.

I had the unfortunate misfortune to use Luton airport in September 2014. The arrivals heading to passport control was little more than a scrum. Being elderly and short I was pushed and knocked about by people who thought that queuing was optional! There were too many people trying to pass through to passport control in an area not designed for this number of people. We were herded along a tunnel which took over 1 hour just to reach passport control - there were not enough staff to deal with the volume of people and after another 30 minutes wait I was able to use my new style passport to get out! I dread to think what travelers from abroad think of their first taste of England.

Firstly there is the awful journey to and from the airport (there's no dedicated train to/from London so you have to pile into whichever packed express train to/from Leicester or Nottingham is passing through and you then have to schlep onto a packed bus to get to/from the railway station). Once inside you enter an overcrowded area of queues that lasts all the way to the aircraft door. The main departure area inside the airport is about three times too small for the number of people passing through and you end up with vast crowds lurking near the corridor to the gates watching the departure boards. There are tiny areas by the gates themselves with no seating and which (for any pair of gates) is reached down a narrow staircase. Extraordinarily the airport seems to board two aircraft's from adjacent gates at the same time which results in two plane-loads of people queuing up the staircase and back down the corridor which means lots of confused people in the wrong queue pushing in and just lots of general unpleasantness. Getting onto the plane is just a nasty sweaty aggressive experience that I would never want to book-end an otherwise beautiful holiday.

This airport is staggeringly poor and seems to be getting worse with time. Finding something positive to say about it is a struggle. There's little point in me listing the vast array of problems with Luton just read some of the review below. Suffice to say I am as experienced a traveller as some of the pilots that use it passing through it a minimum of twice per week and I loathe it increasingly with each visit. The route I fly is not well served therefore I have little choice but to fly from Luton although I choose Heathrow whenever possible and I'm willing to pay a premium to fly from there. It has descended into a national disgrace and an award winning representative for the problems incurred when money-grabbing private enterprise is given the concession to run a public service. The government needs to step in and take action I feel embarrassed to be British whenever I use this airport and witness the bewildered array of overseas visitors wondering what has happened.

Parking especially is a big problem at Luton. Drop off / pick up car park had a 15 minutes limit for £2 but if you leave the car unattended within the 15 mins they will quickly tow it away and you have to pay a £80 fine. The truck drivers are actually watching for who's leaving the car. I've personally seen someone who had to help his old father with the luggage to the terminal and within 10 minutes his car was towed away to the mid term car park what a disgrace! As a kind of relief there's a 30 minutes free parking at mid term car park but the drivers must be very careful as it recently happened to me that I drove to the exit barriers after 28 minutes and somehow I've lost my ticket in the car I desperately looked for it another 2 minutes then finally found it. Well it was exactly 30 mins 25 seconds when I inserted it in the machine but I was asked to pay a full hours fee. When I called the car park office a grumpy guy simply said "you must pay I cannot let you out as you overstayed the free 30 minutes" and wouldn't listen that it's only been 25 seconds he was just repeating the above like a robot. And yes I had to pay £6.90 + £1.95 credit card fee - all this for a mere 25 seconds. My honest opinion as a traveller is that Luton is one of the worst airports in Europe even the eastern European airports are treating the customers with respect compared to Luton's staff treating us as cattle when coming into UK holding us in massive queues and seeing any airport user as a cash cow. All in all Luton is a really unwelcoming airport staff are often unhelpful to say at least there's even £2 charge for luggage trolley! Avoid this horrible airport if you can.

Airports come in all shapes and sizes and you kind of take them for what they are a temporary waiting room. Some are better then others and the really nice ones like Paris-Orly bring a certain romanticism back to flying. Unfortunately Luton is about as romantic as flying bricks to the head. It's as if someone turned a functioning airport and flipped it upside down then turned it in side out. Terminal concourses that are 4 stories high with no sky bridges for planes like the 737 and A-319. This means walking down 4 flights of stairs to get to the tarmac then climb back up stairs to get onto the airplane. I wasn't even mad I was dumbfounded. I really couldn't believe what I was seeing which made me chuckle a bit. Just to hammer the point home said concourses were extremely narrow and lacked any visible seating so it was standing room only until the plane was ready to board. I've only flown out the once so I don't know if this is just one terminal and concourse leg or an example of the entire airport. Judging by the spartan check in hall and uninterested security screeners talking about their weekend across two lanes I'm going to guess it's par for the course.

I have been using Luton for over 20 years for both business and pleasure and it just keeps getting progressively worse. I have had the privilege of travelling all over the world and even so called 3rd world countries do a better job than Luton. They seem obsessed with trying to extract the most amount of cash from every customer. There are queues for everything and unless you are lucky enough to be at a gate near the terminal you end up walking miles. I only live 20 minutes from the airport but would rather drive 50 minutes to Stansted than use Luton.

The passport control section needs help and quickly. We arrived at midnight along with we think 3 other planes and there were only two operatives at passport control. Surely there could have been more something needs to be done as this happened last year. Yes we have to check back into the UK but no we don't need to be treated like cattle.

I'm normally not one to complain easily but Luton today was a very unpleasant experience. The wait at security was almost half an hour and yet 6 out of 12 positions were closed. And that's on a Friday afternoon/evening. On top some of the staff were really grumpy and unfriendly.