Birmingham International Airport Review

Overall Rating

Quiet
Compact
Easy to get to

Not many airlines / flight options for the

Birmingham International Airport as a structure is excellent. It's clean, compact and not over crowded. The terminals tend to be reasonably well maintained and there is a decent selection of the usual shops and eateries. Prices for food and the likes are about the same as at LGW, more expensive than other regional airports such as Coventry, Southampton or Bournemouth.

The airport is large for a regional one, with two terminals that are physically linked (it's easy to walk between the two). However there are not that many flights or routes. BA is the main carrier and links to most western European capitals and a handful of other cities. There is also an off again on again link to New York once or twice a day. As of December 2005 it was operating twice daily but is being threatened with the axe again. There are several good links to the main Pakistani and Indian cities as well, and a 1 a day Emirates link to Dubai so you can link through that an onwards staying with the same airline, but with a lot of waiting. KLM has an Amsterdam route too, very is extremely useful as it operates several times daily, making connections dead easy (AMS is a brilliant transfer hub). Other than that, it's eerily quiet most of the time, especially given the large scale of the place (over capacity isn't the word for it) you can get a "last person alive" feeling.

Flights from Birmingham are generally more expensive than from London or Manchester, and frequency is not as good. Unless you can get a good connecting deal though one of the European hubs, then it's probably not worth using BHX, unless you specifically want to fly from a regional airport.

The airport is probably better connected to the ground than it is to the sky. Ground transport is excellent. There is a monorail train connecting the two terminals direct to the train station / bus interchange (Birmingham International). It's a similarly oversized under-used station, many trains stop here. There are also phones to call Taxi's As of December '05

2 Virgin trains an hour to London (some stop at Milton K and Rugby)
2 Centro trains an hour to Coventry (all stops)
2 Centro trains an hour to Birmingham New Street and onto Wolverhampton (all stops)
various regional services (Central Trains - hourly during the week, 1 or 2 a day on Sunday) and a stopping service to London.

On the ground floor outside the station building are buses. Travel West Midlands has local services to Solihull and the city centre, and an express services running between the airport, Birmingham and Coventry. Exact change is needed for TWM buses.

Overall it's a perfectly adequate airport built for a boom that just never happened. Maybe one of the new regional low cost airlines setting up there many actually finally give the place some of the use it needs!

(The airport is one of many similarly grandiose yet pointless structures built between the 70's and 90's in an attempt to wrest the second city crown from Manchester. It's painful to think of how much was poured down the drain on these mega projects when the city populace was really struggling)