Milan Bergamo Airport

I usually fly Bergamo to UK thus using the non-shengen aerea. After security you are driven to passport control and into a hangar with minimal services insufficient seating only a small stand for food and a small toilet for up to 8-900 persons. After security you're forced to go upstairs and the upper floor is beautiful clean welcoming and with a feel of affluence due to the nice shops bars tall ceilings and the large airside view windows. When you go down to the non-shengen aerea the hangar is still partly used but there is also a new wide and clean hall with better services and seating. Queues are an headache only at peak times baggage claim is fast although the area looks small. Long queues at passport control on exit. Departures area is spacious but arrivals is small and always overcrowded.

This airport is undergoing some works. In the early morning there are queues at the security checks and also at the passport control - a lack of staff. It's a low cost airport - there is a reasonable choice of shops and snack bars. There is also a McDonald's inside Schengen area and you can see the runway while waiting for your flight.

Worst experience of an airport ever . Make sure you allow enough time when flying out of there! Huge motorway/road queues even on a Sunday afternoon! Further unexpected checks just before the gate. Very poor facilities. Looks as if it is being upgraded.

Lots of building work make the departures area fairly hellish but one has to accept that everything at the airport seems to work pretty efficiently. Used mainly by no frills airlines it's a no frills airport.

Bergamo airport is undergoing a good deal of renovation work so please give them a chance! I use Bergamo airport very frequently for my Ryanair flights to London and have never in all these years had cause to complain!

What an awful airport will never use this again dirty badly organised staff rude and shops are virtually non existant as well as the car hire being out of the airport. Italy lovely and will return but not using this airport. I recommend avoiding this airport at all costs. It is sad as airports can give you the first impressions of a country and luckily this airport in no way reflects the rest of the country which I found enchanting.

Arriving at this airport from the UK was fine with little wait for our luggage. However warning to those hiring a car - you must catch a shuttle bus (directly outside the Arrivals entrance) to an off site compound to pick up your car - a fact not explained to us at the car hire desk - consquently we spent a good 40 minutes warning around the airport car parks fruitlessly looking for our car hire bay! For our return journey we found the airport badly organised : long checkin queus little seating VERY long slow moving security queue (leave plenty of time !) chaos in departures with poor signage for flights changing gates and near stampedes for the buses once boarding!

What a nightmare! We passed through this airport on the 30th July after two weeks in the lakes - it was horrendous. Okay it is a "no-frills" airport servicing "no-frills" carriers but that does not excuse all the problems encountered. This was peak season and clearly they simply could not cope with the volume of people. Concerned with possible Milan motorway congestion we were taken there well ahead of check-in time and met a sea of people waiting in a hot check-in area with insufficient seating. People were sitting were they could - even on their suitcases. We were stuck in long queues for check-in - it seems that most flights only have two check-in desks then a massive queue for security but the final straw came at passport control with a queue that snaked round little wonder since they had only one man on duty who was painstakingly thorough! People all around us were getting upset as their flights were due to go in minutes and they had been held up in other queues. Then to add insult to injury once you passed through to the departure gates there was another big queue for the little snack kiosk. From the fellow passengers we spoke with most were fed up with the poor organisation of this airport. We witnessed flights being delayed because people were stuck in the queues people running to try and get on their flights. All in all would strongly recommend that you avoid this airport in the peak season - we will certainly try if we ever visit the Italian lakes again!

Ryanair Bristol to Bergamo return. On the way in it was fine and we were out of the airport with the hire car within 45 mins of landing. Pretty efficient really. Return was shambolic to say the least. Passport control was appalling - 4 flights leaving to different destinations and 2 passport control officers only. No queuing system whatsoever so it was push and shove. Fortunately flight was delayed due to so many Ryanair passengers being held up in the queue. Security seemed very lax compared to the UK. Altogether an inefficient departure process with departure boards giving scant information and instructions. Be prepared to run to catch your plane! Very poor rating given due to the departure process.

This was my first trip through Orio al Serio. On arrival I collected by checked bag 20 minutes after landing which for an Italian airport is very quick. On my return check-in was fairly quick as a number of desks were open. Like on the way out at Stansted no security questions were asked. Once through immigration and the security check all their is is a small duty free shop and a coffee shop. The amount of seating was reasonable but not sufficient for the Ryanair flights scheduled to leave within 45 mins of each of each other. The airport also seems to suffer from a lack of airside buses to transfer passengers to aircraft but thankfully no delay to departure occured. Overall its a basic airport similar in style to other regioanl airports across Italy and I imagine would suffer serious overcrowding at Winter weekends when charter flight traffic picks up in addtion to the low cost operators.