Hamburg Airport

Not Verified | Arrived in Hamburg en route to Edinburgh from Istanbul. Expected renowned German efficiency and a smooth transit through airport for final flight home. Complete mayhem with a near miss disaster ensued instead. On arrival all passengers were funnelled along corridor and down a narrow staircase/escalator combo. Unknowingly this was directly into a narrow glass lined corridor with an abrupt disgorgement into passport control. This resulted in a sudden crush at bottom of escalator as there was already a crowd along corridor. Thankfully a quick thinking passenger hit the emergency button on the escalator which prevented a much more serious crush. In addition the glass lined corridor was hot due to setting sun and overcrowding. There were 3 passport control personnel. It took around an hour to move through passport control with no staff available to explain the situation or ease the overcrowding. Total shambles. Once through passport control another blockage occurred at security. Absolute shambles with people skipping to the front due to connecting flight departures. Queues were closed and merged several times due to malfunctioning conveyor belts and overcrowding. Tempers were frayed. Luckily we had just enough time to make our flight but as someone with a spinal issue due to terminal cancer, attempting to run to departure gate was stress I could’ve done without. Absolutely shocking and indeed dangerously laid out and disorganised airport. Never again!

✅ Trip Verified | It was a horrible experience. There is no sign telling you where to transit to go at the gate to change your flight, the only person there gave me (and other persons) the wrong information, with resulted on almost losing the flight! I had to pass again all the security and passport controls, jumping people on the queue. I am wondering if they do it on purpose or they just don't know how to do their job or they don't care.

✅ Trip Verified | It annoys me this was my first experience with "German efficiency", as it was certainly rude but never efficient. From lost luggage that the airline couldn't communicate with the airport about, awful waiting times followed by being rushed, to having to throw out several items that contained liquid (due to not having the aforementioned lost luggage to store them in, after having to purchase new ones already) and they don't sell any clear one liter bags to carry them in, despite this being a common problem. Judging by other reviews, they clearly don't care and it certainly left an awful impression for me.

Not Verified | Everything B.Gardner of the UK on June 14th and David Cormier (U.S.) on June 13th 2023 said is absolutely exact. We traveled on June 12th 2023, we got to the airport in Hamburg at 8.00am for a 10.55 flight to London on British Airways. After spending 1 hour and 20 minutes to check our luggage at the BA counter (we had E-checked-in the day before) we then got in the security-check line which snaked 1 and a half times the length and width of the airport. One and a half hours later we finally cleared security. Half the security check points were closed. The other half was staffed by rude and overzealous (Kleenex needed to be removed from pockets) personnel who gave the impression of being on a work to rule campaign and did not care that many customers were now about to miss their flights. There were no airport personnel to assist through all of this. I have travelled millions of miles in my life and have never experienced anything this bad. As far as I am concerned, I will never set foot in this airport again.

✅ Trip Verified | I travel frequently on business. From the experiences I had in my life, I must say Hamburg Airport is by far, the worst I had the displeasure of using. I live in Hamburg, so I am frequently using the services of this airport, unfortunately and it is rarely a smooth experience. Today I had the worst experience ever: After luggage drop-off I had to wait for more than 90 min in the security queue. There was nothing special this day, it was just another normal Saturday. Later, when I was already inside the plane, all passengers already on-board 5 minutes before the schedule, my plane was grounded for another 60 minutes. The reason? The airport staff took "too long" loading the luggage in the aircraft. The pilot had to call a representative of airport staff inside the craft to ask what exactly was delaying so much the work of the loaders. TLDR: If you don't like huge waiting times and having your flight delayed for absolutely no reason, stay away from this Hamburg Airport (HAM).

✅ Trip Verified | Worst airport experience I've had. I have used hundreds of airports around the world traveling for work, and I have never encountered a place so disorganized and staff that are so rude. I checked in to a Eurowings Hamburg - London in one of the kiosks which gave me a luggage tag and boarding pass. Then I was supposed to do a simple "bag drop" of my already tagged bag which is usually easy at many airports. Not here. The only option for bag drop was waiting in a queue, for more than an hour, for automated machines that did not work properly. People spent around 15 minutes to get the machine recognize the luggage tag and they needed to repeatedly try from the beginning. I was not able to drop my bag because the tag was not recognized. I asked for help and the airport staff told me that they cannot help and there is no human-operated bag drop. They told me to go to another part of the airport, re-join the queue and try my chance with other machines. I ended up trying several different machines and after trying many times the bag was accepted by the machine. I was shocked that the answer to my simple "can you please help?" question was "no I cannot". I think it's the only instance in my travel life that some airport staff refused a request for help. The security check was especially awful and it's the main reason I'm writing this review. The staff at the security check were extremely rude, only addressed people in German when many people, including me, were trying to communicate with them in English. One of the security people was making fun of my t-shirt and asking random questions (as much as I understood his German) when I was waiting for him to pat me down. It wasn't a simple friendly chit-chat, it was downright rude. Very unprofessional, rude and inefficient service overall. Pretty minor, but the airport itself is not great and the facilities were not so good. There was no shop open to buy any food or drink in the tiny area we were supposed to wait after the passport control. I'm shocked by this experience taking place in Germany. I would avoid this airport in the future. It's also not a good impression for the city of Hamburg in general.

Not Verified | We had the most horrible experience at Hamburg airport. Little to no signage regarding where to check in. Kiosks for check in did not work and referred us to agent. At Lufthansa that means one agent with long lines. We were then sent to machine baggage check in - half not working. One agent to assist for 30 seconds then leaves. It took 30 minutes to submit 4 bags. Then the 90 minute line for security. Just awful.

✅ Trip Verified | I (have to) use this airport regularly and find it highly nerve-wrecking. At departures, queues at security are unpredictable, and the wait can be 2 hours. No fast lane. The recently reintroduced wait time indicator on the website is unreliable and changes quickly. At arrival, buses and jet bridges often leave flights waiting before they can finally disembark. Worst of all, the baggage reclaim is a bad joke, with hour-long waiting times. Today, even people on the small Embraer from Warsaw had a one hour wait. At 1945, the airport showed a screen saying "baggage expected at 1930", which stayed on until 2005 when the belt finally moved.

✅ Trip Verified | I usually go to the airport early and give enough time as sometimes there are a lot of passengers. But this was the 1st time that i queued on the line for 2 hours. There were a lot of machines for baggage scanning but only a few were functioning. It was really chaotic as some passengers were also trying to catch their flight so they try to skip the line. Mind you we dont have a check in baggage as soon as we arrived in the airport we started queueing to go to our boarding gate. Long story short, we missed our flight and it's not the airline's fault. We stayed in the airport and tried to think what we could do as not to ruin the whole trip because we already booked everything. So what we did we booked again a 1 way flight that cost us 650eu and we had to book a hostel for a night for a 9hr layover. This is the worst experience ever that i had with Hamburg Airport!

✅ Trip Verified | People not speaking German as mother tongue are treated with no respect, in a very rude way and shouted at! Even if you speak German to them they are offensive doing bad comments. With a very few exceptions the staff are arrogant and unhelpful! Unacceptable!!