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“Nightmare”

written by paulbrandt on 13/08/2006

Good Points
Baggage claim was ok, only had to wait 45 minutes to an hour for the belt to start.

Bad Points
An absolute joke. I have never seen anything like it. It was a bad end to my holiday. Before we arrived at the aiport the rep told us that Heraklion is a very small airport that handles too many people and that we could expect to stand and queue outside the airport for 20 minutes or so to get into the actual building. When we arrived the huge queues had already formed. The different flights were arranged into various lines. They had reps controlling the lines and they would let dribs and drabs out of each line at a time. It was comical. We took 1 hour and ten minutes to get into the actual airport building. The flight was due to board in 25 minutes. Next there was a queue at the check-in desk. Another 15 minutes. We were at the start of the line of people. There were still lots of people for our flight outside the terminal waiting to get in. By this time the announcer had started calling our flight. People started to panic. When we got checked in we had to join another queue for passport control which wasd the length of the terminal (about 400 metres)! There was just one guard at passport control for around 1500 passengers. When the announcer started announcing final call the passengers for our flight and others started barricading passport control. They were holding up their passports and waving them at the guy. He wasn't even checking them and was just waiving people through. We got through the baggage scanners, where i should add the guy was talking to his friend and not really eatching the monitor, and ran straight to the gate. We didn't get so much of a minute to look at the departure area. We got out to the plane on the bus and the doors were closed ten minutes later. There were still people checkin in. It was a disgrace. It wouldn't take much for a terrorist to get through at Heraklion Airport.

General Comments
Nightmare