Americans Abroad
Related: About this forumAMS Schiphol Airport
On numerous occasions I've traveled to the Netherlands. Over the decades I've seen many changes take place at Schiphol. I even met the Architect who designed the latest iteration.
For a time it seemed to progressively get worse to the point where I considered Frankfurt. This was after my experience in 2014. We waited for over an hour to check our bags and then another hour for security and almost missed our flight.
Last week we came back from another trip and what a difference! Bag wait was 5 minutes and we breezed through security and passport control. We arrived at the departure gate with more than a 1-1/2 hour margin, including duty free. In fact the longest wait was at the duty-free store cashiers' counter.
I spoke with one of the people at the security checkpoint and he said they had had gone through a number of improvement stages.
The walking distances are still a challenge, but overall, a tremendous improvement.
They say that the Netherlands is "clean and well-organized".
DFW
(56,520 posts)But it has gotten better, I've heard. Once I arrived from Atlanta only to find that my onward flight to Düsseldorf (all of 35 minutes) had been canceled, and I had to wait four hours for the next one. Their business lounge is OK, so it was sorta tolerable, but if I could have found my luggage, I would have been home faster if I could have taken the train.
On the other hand, my wife came back through there in August (Boston to Schipol to Düsseldorf), and said it was a breeze.
Clash City Rocker
(3,541 posts)We traveled a lot internationally on business a couple years back, and Schiphol was one airport where we never got grilled for twenty minutes before we were allowed to leave (cough, Heathrow, cough). It was always clean and everyone was friendly, and we never had any trouble getting to our luggage or our rental car. My only beef is that its so big, you have to walk for a long time to get through the place. Weve never had any problems there.