Cardiff Airport

It's tatty when compared to the likes of Bristol International Airport both in terms of number of destinations you can fly to as well as overall look and feel and the food options are low quality and over priced. On the plus side it's easy to get to by car but public transport options are severely limited and it's a nightmare if you are reliant on a taxi and your flight arrives at the same time as a load of others (expect big queues!) Definitely not a place with the customer at it's heart.

Can't understand the fuss with poor road access. Cardiff is much easier to get to than most UK airports. I regularly fly KLM to Schiphol then to Shanghai. CIA is shabby and run-down catering facilities very mediocre but fortunately I don't need to use them as I drive my own car and find I can get from the place very easily. I have never encountered traffic problems. I understand taxi and public transport provision is poor.

Have flown from Cardiff airport several times in the past 12 years. Little has changed however - the airport is in dire need of a complete make-over. Not the cleanest of places decor old and overall looks more like a bus station. Going through customs coming from an Amsterdam flight also can seem a little nerve-wrecking - many folks are pulled over and usually customs officers with sniffer dogs come over to you I assume sniffing for drugs. This can be a little intimidating with a dog sniffing all over your luggage and person! Outside there is only one taxi company and they can charge 27 pounds sterling for a trip to downtown Cardiff. In contrast if you take a taxi from Cardiff to the airport with another taxi company it will be considerably less! One final note - recently it took me 40 minutes in the morning to get through security leaving Cardiff! In summary although this can be a useful airport to link with Schiphol in Amsterdam in reality it is way below standard and I'm surprised Welsh Tourism and local business do not push for better standards and service. Bristol airport is much nicer!

Didn't personally fly from Cardiff but we took my daughter and a friend there as they were going on a day's educational visit to Auschwitz. Access was well signposted and the separation of "drop- offs" and "pick-ups" seemed to work quite well. We were pleasantly surprised at being able to drop off the girls right outside the terminal building without any fuss. Picking them up late at night was less straightforward as they seemed to take ages coming through to the Arrivals area after the plane had landed even though none on their flight had hold luggage to collect. The delay was at passport control as three flights arrived within about 20 minutes of each other. By the time the girls came through the queue for car parking payment at one end of the arrivals area virtually joined the queue at the other end for the (one?) ticket validating machine. Some people obviously got fed up waiting in one or other of these queues so there was a snarl up by the exits from the car park while people left their cars to pay at the "box" nearby and others with tickets ready (but time running out) fuming because the exits were blocked. More pay / validation points are needed. As to the airport itself my daughter (used to Liverpool & Manchester) described it as "sweet"!

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.

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.