Munich Airport is a great test of travelers’ patience

long queue queue
Munich Airport is a great test of travelers’ patience

October 4, 2024, 10:41 am

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Many airlines recommend being at the airport two hours before departure. But that hardly works on public holidays in Munich. There are kilometers long queues in front of the security check.

On German Unity Day, Munich Airport descends into chaos. The queue for the security check is maintained for several kilometers; according to the passengers, the waiting time was about 2.5 hours, a spokesperson from the airport said it was 1.5 hours. Several videos on social networks showed people waiting in front of the building far out into the covered court.

“In front of the passport scanner, those who don’t have elbows started to lose out. So we pulled staff together, we made sure an orderly queue kept moving and distributing water to passengers,” said an airport spokesperson.

According to him, there were several reasons for the traffic. The security checkpoints in Terminal 2 have been under renovation for months and are not operating at full capacity. To do this, Lufthansa asks its customers to plan more time and arrive earlier. At peak times, even more passengers go through the security check at the same time. The “difficult situation” would be made worse by construction work on the S8 and the resulting time change and the Oktoberfest as a crowd puller for both at home and abroad. Due to the “bridge day”, waiting times are not expected to decrease this weekend.

According to “Spiegel”, the head of Lufthansa Carsten Spohr recently announced that Munich is the worst airport in Europe. Delays and missing workers are the order of the day there. Spohr is even said to complain regularly to Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder: Munich is worse than Frankfurt. Last year, Lufthansa moved several aircraft from Frankfurt to Munich to be able to offer more flights. This step should now be partially reversed.