It’s continually baffling to me how Germany’s busiest airport in Frankfurt is so terrible, especially when the alternative Lufthansa hub in Munich is always so pleasant and efficient.
(Look, I realize that Lufthansa is a co-owner of its Munich terminal, but still, there’s something fundamentally broken about Frankfurt that needs fixing.)
Ultimately, the best option would be to build a new greenfield airport and turn the existing one into a high-density new town, leveraging the extensive ground transportation connections. But given that the last major airport Germany attempted to build, Berlin Brandenburg, is still not open, this is unlikely to come to pass.
READ: British Airways to refresh lounges in Chcago, Edinurgh and Berlin
But what can be done?
Just spruce the place up a bit
Fundamentally, the airport needs to look and feel less dreadful. It is a sea of miserable industrial grey hard surfaces, poorly lit with unpleasant lighting, dingy, dinged up and unloved in every way.
It also feels perpetually under construction, although this construction never really seems to help to improve the experience. And I’m often unsure whether an area is just ugly and industrial or is currently under reconstruction. That just shouldn’t happen in a modern terminal.
Crucially, natural light is hugely beneficial to an airport, and even if internal spaces don’t permit windows this could perhaps be achieved through the use of skylights and lightwells. This is not revolutionary technology: the airport just needs to be bothered.
Fix the awful security checkpoints
The way that security is handled at Frankfurt needs a massive rethink. I’m not sure why it’s always a deeply horrible experience, with unpleasant staffers and needlessly long queues — more so than any of the other German airports I’ve ever used — but it is.
Is it because the security zones are understaffed? Because they’re in miserable grim spaces? Whatever it is, it reflects badly on the airport, on the city and indeed on Germany GmbH, and it needs to be fixed.
Increase the minimum connection times
Frankfurt’s minimum connection time is 45 minutes, and Lufthansa will sell you “legal”, i.e., protected same-ticket-booking connections, on that basis.
This is absurdly short for such a badly organized and inefficient airport that is often prone to weather delays, and especially one where the northwestern runway can itself mean that an aircraft takes more than half an hour to taxi to its stand.
Arguments could be made that this doesn’t matter if the connection is protected, but I don’t buy them. For a start, it’s an inherent faff to get rebooked, if there’s even space.
Moreover, airlines are renowned for trying to evade their duty of care around accommodation and compensation for delays. And, fundamentally, taking hours and hours extra, or having to overnight if there aren’t frequent enough flights to your destination, is just a bad passenger experience.
Improve wayfinding within the terminal
Even on shorter distances, wayfinding and passenger pathways in the airport need a significant upgrade.
Signposting is very poor indeed and almost feels purposefully vague to encourage passengers to get lost in the shopping mall part of the airport.
Gate zones simply disappear, while on arrival even signs to the baggage reclaim are not consistently visible throughout the journey. This can and must be improved.
Figure out how to remedy the airport’s dreadful layout
The overall layout of the airport’s passenger buildings is of two western piers in a V-shape (A gates), connecting to a Y-shaped central pier (B gates), and then the eastern side of the terminal extending lengthways in two buildings (C and D gates).
This is fundamentally problematic for Lufthansa and Star Alliance connecting operations in particular when a walk from A to C — or even between the two piers of A — can be over a kilometre.
The lack of moving walkways, and the lack of enough moving walkways for the passenger flows, feels negligent. Adding these in, even post hoc, is neither expensive nor complex, and failing to do so is just contemptuous towards passengers.
The bizarre and slow rooftop people-mover, which presently does not extend to the end of the A gates, nor usefully serve the C gates, needs to be radically rethought. An expansion of the shuttle to actually serve most of the gates of the airport would be very helpful.
A new terminal is being built on the other side of the two main runways, which will be served by an entirely separate people-mover system that will only connect to the existing one, and which will move so slowly that it will take a full eight minutes to travel between terminals even before changing people-mover.
Create halfway-decent bus gate operations
Frankfurt also suffers from a lousy amount of bus gate usage. This should not necessarily be a problem if the bus gate departure and arrivals area can be designed with thought and consideration for passengers.
Zurich Airport is a particularly good example of this: passengers descend via lifts or escalators to a central, spacious, well-lit area with cafés and shops, which doesn’t feel like a bunker basement afterthought.
By contrast, a recent bus gate experience at Frankfurt was hiking halfway along the A pier to climb down multiple flights of stairs (no escalators or lifts) to be held on the stairs while they waited for a bus to turn up. This is, simply, insulting.
And given the prevalent weather and amount of business travelers using the airport with their wheeled bag plus laptop bag, let alone leisure passengers who don’t purchase hold luggage for short trips, it seems dangerously negligent that the airport insists on using stairs rather than ramps at the aircraft, leaving passengers tottering down soaking wet steps without handrails. Roll-up ramps are used at airports worldwide, and are hugely superior.
In the meantime, any airline using bus gates should be required to allow passengers to check a piece of luggage for free, and to notify passengers that they will be using a bus gate in order for them to make mobility restrictions known to the airline. Many travelers are fine walking in terminals and down a jetway but would make different choices in terms of requesting assistance or checking luggage if they knew steps were going to be involved.
Dramatically revamp hotel access
A modern airport, especially one where passengers are making connections, needs decent hotel options at multiple price points. Frankfurt has three hotels that are connected via walkways: the grotty old Sheraton relatively close by, and the slightly newer Hilton and Hilton Garden Inn.
These are always ridiculously expensive: at a glance for a single midweek night a month out from the time of writing, all three are over €200 for a single night. None would be worth more than €100 if the supply were not artificially constrained by the airport.
There are a number of mid-range hotels in nearby towns, but these require bussing, and the airport’s bus area is simply atrocious: one single pull-in on an unsheltered island for over a dozen hotels. Since the forthcoming terminal 3 is on the opposite side of the airport, it seems likely that this problem will multiply in the future.
It is hugely inadequate for either the number of buses or the number of passengers using it, leading to a horrific scrum and passengers peering for buses that are largely unfit for modern usage: nonexistent or inadequate luggage areas, poor mobility access, and always driven as if they’re on the Nürburgring so that rolling suitcases become a danger.
The very least the airport could do is create a sheltered bus area with enough space for a half-dozen buses, and mandate that those buses are accessible and driven in a safe and sensible manner.
At the end of the day, the airport still needs knocking down and starting over somewhere else. But there are certainly ways that its operator could improve the situation in the meantime.
