Colombo Airport

My wife and I visited Sri Lanka 12 in January 2010 and found the airport generally very good on all counts apart from a large cafeteria type restaurant in the departure lounge which served some of the worst coffee I have had for a long time.

Used this airport for departure on 30 Jan with a flight at midnight. What a zoo! Far too few entrance doors for the large number of pax to even get inside the terminal. Immigration a discrace for a country trying to attract tourists - with three or four wide-bodied flights departing around the same time only six immigration desk were open. Next organizational gaffe: CX and EK departures scheduled within 10 minutes of each other from neighbouring gates 8 and 9 with a shared security checkpoint. Our flight delayed by more than one hour due to this horrendous circus.

Small modern clean airport. Has a fair amount of shops for its size slightly overpriced however not the ideal airport for a transit more than 1-3 hours. Take use of their stopover package which allows you to go out to spend time at the beach or to explore Colombo city though I think its available only for SriLankan Airlines passengers. Overall nice airport has the potential for so much more.

I use Colombo often as transit airport Frankfurt-Singapore and cannot say anything bad. Airport is overall clean easy to find the ways and gates restaurant area is ok the transit desk is working well.

I must have been lucky because both arrival and departure on a recent trip to Colombo was very smooth. New procedures have been introduced to monitor swine flu with immigration officials sporting white masks - as soon as you pass through to arrivals all the locals are sneezing without any care! The security checks are still very much in evidence and with a constant military cordon around the airport. I was though able to be picked up and dropped off directly outside the terminal building. The airport has recently been modernised and has the benefit of the usual shops and restaurants - what I didn't like was the fact that the toilet attendants hover and expect tips and that once through the final security checks there is no access to the toilets from the gate area. Annoyingly because of the archaic Sri Lankan currency regulations everything is priced in $US

I flew to CMB from Doha and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the airport. I was through immigration and out of the airport in less than 30 minutes. The touts are numerous and best avoided. Outbound check-in area was nice and spacious. The duty free shops and restaurants are plentiful and toilet facilities clean. Overall CMB is a small yet modern airport.

Colombo Airport now has plenty of shops at the departure and arrival lounge. BIA needs more expansion and an expressway is underway.

Well the nightmare described by a contributor below has not improved - far from it. Somewhere within the mad bureaucracy a new scheme has been devised for departing passengers. You may now not be driven to the airport terminal by friends/associates. Instead they must drop you off about 500 metres ahead of the terminal where you are transferred to a rickety bus without A/C. How this is supposed to improve security (the officially stated reason) is beyond me - but it does provide additional income for touts who pounce on passenger's luggage and lift it into the buses. On the upside arrivals are quite smooth but that is to be expected at an airport with hardly any traffic worth mentioning.

The inbound is OK but be prepared for a total nightmare on leaving the country. Before you arrive at the airport you join a long bus queue to have your Passport checked. Then you disembark the coach and are met with a huge throng of friends and relatives seeing off one person. Then your ticket and passport is checked again before you get into the building. 10 feet further in all your luggage goes through X-ray scanners and you are subjected to a full personal body frisk. And I do mean full. Genital areas too. These soldiers are also wearing filthy gloves that have done the same thing to hundreds of others before you. Absolutely disgusting. Then you will probably have to open your case because none of the young soldiers/airmen know what simple equipment is. A camera battery for example. In a camera. I even had a Cuban cigar taken out of its tube and handled. All the time you are holding up the queus of people behind you. Then it's off to the check in desks down a short corridor to another ticket check point and luggage check. All this before you have even got to check in. I totally agree with Andrew here. I've travelled through most of the airports in the world and I have never ever seen one as bad as this. It makes Homeland Security look like amateurs. It's a fairly nice country but nobody has any idea of what they are doing.

Modern construction and airbridges good shopping in departure including souvenirs garments tea etc. Plenty of seats and restaurants. Plenty of check-in counters and baggage carousels for collection. Taxi and forex conversion counters in arrivals. Immigration very slow and careless and not very co-operative or friendly immigration staff. My passport was stamped with the previous day's date when my flight arrived at 4AM the staff were so callous not to even bother changing the date on the stamp!