Cologne/bonn Airport

✅ Trip Verified | This airport went from being one of my favourite airports to one of my worst. The quality of security personnel in this airport went from efficient and polite to downright rude, slow and well below standards for a first world airport. From having two terminals, each with its own security gates, the airport now has only one security entrance serving both terminals. This causes extremely long queues to form, and adds to everyone's frustration. The passport control entering terminal 2 is now completely inadequate, and catering and refreshments airside of the passports gate are pathetic. The frequent flyer lounge has been privatised - this was another bad idea. The company running it cut down on service that now is more of a cafeteria with sandwiches and warm beer than a business lounge. This used to be such a convenient airport for me to use, but I now avoid it whenever possible. Sad to see something good deteriorate so markedly.

✅ Trip Verified | This is the worst airport experience that I had to go through. And this bad experience is not due to the long queues or the lack of information, but for the incredible rudeness of the staff at the security check. I have never in all my travels encountered such rude people. They basically should not be in contact with the public if all they can do is shout at you. I will do whatever is possible to avoid this airport in the future and will advise any person I know to do the same. This is a first and I am deeply sorry that it has to be about an airport in Germany, a country I have lived in and which I love. But these persons should not be employed, if they cannot show the minimum of politeness.

✅ Trip Verified | Mismanaged and understaffed! Atrocious queue management. Had a connecting flight with 1.5hrs in between. Took me over 1 15 minutes to get to my gate; thanks to having only 2 security gates open, and only after jumping the queue. I counted at least 10 flights departing within the following 60 minutes - doesn’t take a genius to count that this is insufficient. To add insult to injury the staff at security, clearly lacking any motivation, had absolutely no sense of urgency. I take about 30 flights a year and flown many airports - this has to be the worst experience I had. Curious and uncommon that even on connecting flights passengers had to leave the secure zone and go through security again. Surely if you’re struggling to manage security, you can reduce all the connecting passengers checks…

✅ Trip Verified | Very bad experience, you can easily see the age of Terminal 1 everywhere you look at arrival, it's really quiet hard to navigate to get out of the arrival hall, escalators not working, getting to trains took 20min just walking on departure. Getting to departure hall was ok, not long waiting lines but the experience there was awful my flight was at 21:25 with many other departures around that time or later, but all shops started to close from 8pm, not enough places to sit, people sitting everywhere on the ground, long lines in restaurants/bars/cafes - worst experience were toilets, water everywhere on the ground.

Not Verified | This is the worst Airport I have been in. I was in transit from a RyanAir flight from Stansted to reach Corfu Airport with a second RyanAir flight. The first flight was scheduled to arrive 9.45am but actually arrived 9.59am and I was forced to get out from the departure area and to do security checks again. The second flight was leaving 11.25am with gate closing at 10.55am which gave me 56 minutes to pass security again and run to the gate. The queue to security checks was so huge that I would have needed more than 3 hours to complete it on time. The organization was a disaster and the number of security tracks was way to small compared to the number of passenger arriving. As a result I finally missed the connecting flight and I was forced to book another flight with stop in Budapest and pay for a hotel night. Companies should allow at least 3hr transit time in this case and not trying to sell faster tickets with insufficient transit times.

✅ Trip Verified | On last 29th July we flew from Cologne to Porto. We arrived at Cologne-Bonn airport two hours before to check in our suitcase with time and have time to have a snack and a drink, We spent one hour and half on a queue for arriving at control and we arrive at our gate just on time. When We passed the control the queue was much longer so I suppose that lot of people missed flights, In our flight lots of seats were empty when the person in check in said that it was impossible to change seats because the flight was full- I have travelled and used different airports in Europe and Canada and this is the worst I have never used.

✅ Trip Verified | Our first flight was from Manchester which had a delay as we arrived in Cologne. Then the staff there would not let us transit and made all passengers go to the exit. So we had to go back to departures and join the queue for security which was so long that we missed our connecting flight. I booked a further flight for later in the evening and we checked in online and joined the security line which ran for probably a mile all the way out of the airport. We arrived at the security line well before 3 hours. There were hundreds of passengers all stuck in the queue and due to this a lot would be missing their flights. There was one staff checking the boarding passes with one machine before letting you through into scan your bags at security. So there was a huge bottleneck there. Several people were jumping into the queues out of desperation. The staff were rude and not willing to answer any questions. The airport was badly signposted. All airline counters had signs saying no info, but they were happy to sell you tickets. I travel a lot and this is the worst airport I've experienced, just disorganised chaos. Hundreds of passengers missing flights because of the airports incompetency. Never flying through this airport again and I recommend other travellers to avoid this. Huge amount stress caused to me and my family due to their inability to manage an airport

Not Verified | One of my worst experiences! Only landed in Cologne to transfer - no signs of where to go, some signs even misleading, no staff anywhere and if you do get lucky finding one, they won't or can't help you because "this is not their job". Missed my flight as a result. Also, finding someone communicating in English is tough, they probably do understand but for some unknown reason refuse to answer other than in German. Most disappointing experience in a long time and my first missed flight ever.

✅ Trip Verified | I'm a frequent traveller, 6 trips this year alone and this is by far the worst airport I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing. The queue for security was probably 2 miles long, which stretched across two buildings and outside. It was at least 4-6hrs just for security, a member of staff said (which is a conservative est.). They only had one person checking boarding passes for an entire terminal and only one person at a time being x-ray'd/searched. There was no organisation, management should be sacked immediately and not let anywhere near an airport again. Staff/police were rude and ignorant. They couldn't care less if you missed your flight. Surely it would've made more sense to call flights to security, in order of departure? We turned up 3hrs+ before our flight with no bags to check in. We queued for almost 3hrs and then had no choice but to ask people if we could queue jump. After 3hrs of queueing, 3 considerable queue jumps of almost mile and a 40min flight delay, we unbelievably made it onto our flight. But there were numerous empty seats on the plane, through no fault of the passengers. I wouldn't fly from this airport again, even if they paid me.

✅ Trip Verified | Worst ever experience in airport. Airport completely understaffed, no information nor help provided to travellers. The very few staff were completely unhelpful. Police not very useful. In these circumstances, they should limit the number of flights.