The building is very old of course and you can see that it far exceeds the capacity for which it was planned, still in terms of convenience it's hard to beat, and I'm not looking forward to having to fly from BER sometime in the future (though I'm pretty confident it won't fully open before 2025, if ever).
Berlin's awful setup results in delays across the region, it's no wonder other airports are reluctant to link there and divert to Frankfurt instead.
This allows you to arrive at almost the exact moment the gate closes because there will be no passengers for other flights in a queue with you. The gate agents can even see you going through security and will wait for a minute or so.
I still like Tegel a lot, as it's very close to the West center of the city.
My worst airport experience has been trying (and failing, twice; on consecutive days) to fly from Tegel Terminal C to Helsinki (EasyJet). My best airport experiences have been flying from Tegel Terminal A (Finnair) to Helsinki.
Unlike Tegel, though, the gate area and the screening areas are open spaces, with glass to separate. Tegel always feels a bit claustrophobic, and as a jet-lagged traveller my first time departing, I admit it took awhile for me to figure out where the hell I needed to go.
source: https://www.changiairport.com/en/airport-guide/departing/sec...
Quite frankly New York has a similar problem. There is rail service to JFK but requires an extra cost ticket and it's a fairly long trip (moreso if you're taking the subway instead of LIRR). I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money. Yeah, Newark has rail (but it doesn't run particularly late).
It won't get you there quicker. A hypothetical non-stop direct bus route from most places in Manhattan to JFK would take around an hour under ideal conditions, about the same as the train already does. And in non-ideal conditions (around rush hour) and with multiple stops along the route, you would be looking at something like 2 hours, and worse on bad days.
There's a big caveat though: from Midtown. Getting to JFK from elsewhere in Queens (or e.g. Brooklyn) is a pretty circuitous route on the train. A bus could easily do that in less than two hours. On a good day a subway ride into Manhattan might take you half an hour. On a bad day…
I mean, look, I prefer rail, but not by so much that I'd ding Tegel (or Oakland) for not having rail connections. In Oakland the rail connector cost about half a billion dollars and required undoing a bunch of landscaping and road improvements. In the context of Berlin where you're talking about the Brandenberg airport being over budget and oft delayed, I simply don't see Tegel's transit connections as being shameful (or particularly bad).
For a single trip ticket, that sounds about right. If you're going to take any other trips that day a day ticket makes more sense and I think the difference is a bit larger.
The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.
The TXL bus takes about twenty minutes from the Hauptbahnhof, and Alexanderplatz is three stops away on the S-Bahn (saving about ten minutes). Transiting to/from the Hbf gives you some extra transit connections as well. And as an added bonus, the TXL bus pretty much drops you at the gate.
Instead of using some sort of announcement system employees would just yell at people at German, so once I had to yell back at them to speak English.
Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.
It turns out the airport hadn’t assigned a crew to unload the plane, and Lufthansa sent an entire plane’s worth of checked luggage to Reykjavik. Cue the whole plane having to be processed through lost luggage. That’s was a long day.
That seems odd. Would a German do the same in the US?
It's among the worst airports, but still my favourite. Super fast public transport from center, with a cheap ticket, and fast security throughput. I need to reserve much less extra time for Tegel than any other airport, and side expenses never exceed the price of the flight itself (which can easily happen at many other European airports).
Depends where in the city you need to go to. Ostbahnhof to Schönefeld is 16 minutes with the RB 14, 17 minutes with the RE 7. A vastly better experience than the TXL bus which is often crowded.
Rather than building new airports, we should be making flying significantly more inconvenient, to discourage this cost to the environment.
This is false. Both are accessible with a trip on the metro U7 (which cuts the entire city NW<>SE) plus a tiny/short (depending on the airport) bus trip.
We're talking about 30/45 minutes, the large part of whom is on a very frequent metro line. By airport connection standards, this is very convenient (besides being cheap).
> awful, way over capacity, bad facilities
"awful" doesn't mean anything in this context.
Capacity is not so immediate to assess. While terminal C has a standard structure with two security checkpoints, terminal A has checkin and gates directly connected, which makes them very efficient (checkin queues develop in a corridor, essentially, but due to the checkin/gate efficiency, they don't last long).
Facilities are not "bad" - they're not modern, which is different (ie. computing stations). This is obviously a pain for people who need to be plugged 24/7 to a socket, but there's plenty of airports with an old structure.
If you take a taxi or rent a car to Tegel, it's extremely convenient.
It won't go to Tegel, but might be extended to the BER!
https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215847355/U-Bahn-Der...
You are thinking of the U6 though (see linked article)
Facilities-wise I was talking about lack of seats, lack of spacious and modern and frankly sometimes clean bathrooms, lack of sufficient staff doing things like passport checking and security, lack of physical space for movement of people through the airport, lack of food/drink and shopping quality and variety, particularly past security. All of these apply to both, with Schonefeld being noticeably worse on every point.
Capacity - All I can say is that at both, there are slow-moving queues of people at gates that restrict the movement of people trying to get to other gates. There is more throughput of people now than the airports were designed for - they're tautologically over capacity - if they weren't then this wouldn't happen, as it doesn't at most other airports.
Public transport - this one's subjective and depends on usecase, and I'm not claiming it's terrible. It works, and sure it's relatively quick. But it's exactly those connections (from Tegel) that bring the inconvenience for two reasons - the first is that it's more difficult to navigate to the center having to make connections if you don't know the system (i.e. for tourists). The second is if you have heavy luggage - it's really not convenient at all to lug bags onto and off of connections, especially buses. If you're a local who knows the networks and you're doing a short flight with hand luggage, I agree that in that usecase it's fine.
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A bit meta now: I think it's amazing and I'm genuinely pleased to see that you're not only disagreeing with my opinions, but coming to the defence of these airports and outwardly saying they're really good, along with other commenters. I worded my original comment quite strongly and matter-of-factly because I honestly thought that 'everyone' would hold broadly the same views. Anecdotally, I've never talked to anyone living in Berlin who disagreed with me on any of this, and I've never imagined whilst being in either of these airports that anyone else there could be thinking 'this is great'. I'm amazed to see how wrong I was, and I love to be exposed to the breadth of opinions that exist out there, through forums like HN, just because the scale of the internet allows them to surface. Always love to have a good debate about such things, it makes me remember the counter points I'm overlooking and/or discover new ones and rethink my original opinions a bit.
It sure feels like a bygone era. A luxury in the small. Like cheating out on all the hateful things about flying. Exit the gates and enter the city.
It's understandable that it won't last, but until then anyone can get a taste of how convenient flying must have seemed when you weren't shuttled out to a remote location and held for hours in a Gibsonian dystopia without the tech until finally left to move on.
As a result, air traffic is somewhat low with about 33 million passenger p.a. Heathrow alone gets almost three times as much.
The reason for having two (and, previously, three) smaller airports instead of a single, large one are obviously historical: both East and West Berlin each needed their own. In those times, traffic was even lower because few people in the East ever got to fly, West Berlin had basically no industry or business that was not exclusively local, and the population of West Berlin tended to be somewhat poorer as well.
When I was living there I'd always try to fly to Fiumicino because of that. I can't imagine what impression it must give to tourists on their first trip to the city.
Whilst we're ragging on Schönefeld, my least favourite part is having to walk through burger king to get to the departure gates.
This is part of Berlin's unique culture, though, isn't it? Usually, the capital cities aren't also average to below average in living costs, which Berlin is. Berlin isn't convenient, Berlin is dirty, raw and cheap.
It’s still not quite SF or NYC or London prices, but it is much more in line with the rest of Germany now.
It's been my impression from the two or three times a year that I'm in Berlin for a few days that it just works very differently, there's a trade-off between cost of living vs convenience that people accept when they move to Berlin. It's dirtier, a bus or train may just break down, people are generally a bit more rowdy, and you don't expect much from the administration, but then again: you pay a lot less, so it's worth it, like a hostel compared to a hotel.
https://www.statista.com/chart/15738/the-contribution-of-sel...
https://qz.com/753244/berlin-is-the-only-capital-city-in-eur...
Berlin is quite a unique capital in that it's relatively poor and contributes relatively little to the national economy. Apart from its size warranting certain infrastructure with sufficient capacity, it'd be surprising if it had much better infrastructure than it does. Its economy doesn't easily allow it.
Berlin can be cheap relative to other capitals (though this is getting less true) but the extent to which that's the case depends on your personal choices.
Public infrastructure is another matter because it serves everyone and everyone contributes - there needs to be a minimum bar. And yes, if I pay the same taxes as everyone else, I want a comparable level of service and convenience in my infrastructure to what people in the other cities get.
The taxes aren't the same as well - local infrastructure isn't a federal issue, so federal income tax doesn't pay for that. Berlin's tax factor for companies (a major part of local taxes) is 410%, compared to Hamburg's 470%, Munich's 490% or Cologne's 475%. Berliners have decided to go with lower taxes to attract companies away from other cities, so Berlin has less money to spend on public infrastructure, even though Berlin gets a lot of subsidies from other states (2-3bn/year).
It's really the worst airport I've been to and as you say makes the whole situation a lot worse.
It's less than 500m to the terminal A.
If one's really bothered by this (d'oh), they can take the U7+bus, which ends in front of terminal A (in addition to being much more frequent).
As an American I rather liked Tegel (and the cute little I [hexagon] TXL bumper stickers I'd see periodically). It's small, and I imagine when things go wrong they'll go really wrong. Although I'm somewhat used to that at SFO with the fog, I'm glad I missed the German Air Force crash at SXF by a day or two since everything to diverted to TXL. Compared to London City there was dramatically less walking at Tegel and the public transit connections were better. While London transit will accept NFC payments, Berlin requires an app (albeit one of the best transit apps I've used).
The only airport that I've visited that really stood out as being awful was Amsterdam. It took about three miles of walking to get to the gate (from the "airport" Hilton), there was absolute chaos between the security checkpoint and passport control (wall to wall passengers, no indication where the lines started or ended, no airport staff, etc), and Americans flying Delta (but not KLM) get singled out for extra interrogation at the gate. God forbid you want to buy a train ticket.
They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these.
It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first).
To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.