Frankfurt Airport

Having been stranded at Frankfurt airport by Lufthansa (the Fawlty Towers of airlines). I spent a gruelling 3 hours wandering around it's dirty corridors looking for somewhere decent and open to eat. It's only 6pm!!! The staff are unhelpful, argumentative and confrontational. The organisation is awful, being given conflicting information by so many people i gave up, delays, delays and more delays. Lost baggage, refusal to forward excess baggage paid for when delays caused us to have to take another flight which apparently, is our fault!!!! and services closing at 5pm. No cafés open to take refreshment while waiting for delayed flights!!! What a joke!!! Never again!!!!

Frankfurt airport is big and sprawling and there can often be long distances between where you are and where you need to be. They are very well known for never having enough staff to cope with demand. A security area may have ten conveyer belts, but expect only one or two to be staffed. There may be a dozen passport cubicles, but only one or two will be in use. In this way - they generate their now famous very long queues. Because of the sprawling disorganised nature of the airport, it is often necessary to pass through two sets of security. This is a trap that catches many people out, they think they have been searched and are now in the departures area, so do not expect the second 30 minute queue and miss their flight. Be warned!

The combined effect of two, possibly three very long queues is that many transmit passengers simply can not make their connections, through no fault of their own. Sometimes it is just not physically possible to catch your connecting flight.

If you try to attract the attention of a member of staff to point out that you are going to miss your flight, expect them to be very rude and totally unsympathetic.

Expect the staff to be rude anyway. Not all of them, obviously, but there are a couple of characters I have had the misfortune to witness being extremely rude and unpleasant on more than one occasion. I haven't been directly on the receiving end myself, yet, but it is still extremely distasteful to witness. I flew today, 15.02.2015 - and witnessed the immigration person in front of me scream, SCREAM at the woman behind me to get back behind the line (she had followed me to the counter). The lady appeared Middle Eastern so probably wasn't able to read the 'keep behind the line' sign or understand the guard's German, so was confused. The Guard just shouted louder and more angrily until she was screaming and red faced. After the woman stepped back the guard cursed her very nastily under her breath, which frankly I didn't want to hear. Meanwhile one of the airport staff in a red jacket was shouting at the queuing people in English - and I suspect many in the crowd couldn't speak English - to get into two lines. No one person can just form a queue of two lines by themselves, it takes a bit of time and co-operation with other people, but when he didn't get immediate compliance with his order he started shouting very sarcastic and rude comments such as "Bit too difficult for you to understand, is it? Bit too hard for you? Bit much to ask?" He was extremely rude, sarcastic and very unprofessional. When a worried Asian man waved his ticket and said "I am going to miss my flight!" this guy snapped back at the top of his voice "Everybody is going to miss their flight, now get back into line!"

It seems absolutely incredible to me that employees of Frankfurt airport expect to be able to get away with treating their customers this way.

Awful, awful awful. Personally I will fly via Hannover if at all possible, this is a much less stressful, more efficient and friendlier option. Unfortunately this time of year there aren't enough flights and times to meet up with the trains, hence me being forced, very reluctantly, to fly via Frankfurt :-(

Not sure about the racist aspect of this airport, as some of the other posts indicate, but a few things that I am confident in saying about this airport is that it is extremely ugly and inconvenient.

The place looks and feels like one big morgue. Avoid if you can.

Try to avoid at all costs. If you travel to UK/Ireland Frankfurt Airport hire some cheap English speaking staff who are exceptionally rude and racist, especially if you are white. When they see your UK or Irish passport they will ask you a ton of questions like where you had been over the last couple of days, why you have been away, what was the purpose of your visit to Ireland etc. I believe that neither Lufthansa nor Frankfurt Airport care about the passengers less than any other airport in Europe or the US. I travel frequently accross Europe and the US but this level of service is really the worst...ever. Try to fly via any other airport in Europe, and in Germany via MUnic or Zurich or whatever but not Frankfurt.

ive been to many airports around the globe but FRA has to be the very best. this airport has everything, they even got playgrounds for kids!

Lufthansa cancels our reservation "by error" and refuses to fix the problem or reinstate our reservations. We already had our boarding passes in hand but they said we did not have any reservations for us and seats were not available. Only after we say that we are filing a complaint that anyone paid attention. The agent then says we did not pay for our tickets and if we could show evidence they could do something. I happen to have the receipt and showed it to her but she refused to take a look at it and continued to say nothing can be done. They finally gave us other seats which were two rows away from our original seating. We found out that our seats (we are non-white) that were confirmed by Lufthansa 4 months prior were given away to passengers who are white!! And to do so they canceled our reservations!

On my way to take my united flight to Washington, .was looking for Z17, couldn't find it. Asked a police officer, he said let me show u with a smile, took me to a corner-cubicle style- where there were tow men and one women sitting and chatting in German...once they saw me they all stood up, took my carry on, checked every piece of it and checked every inch of my body...bear in mind I'm just transferring and I already went through two security check point, the French one and German one.... I look like a Hispanic with brown skin color, u do the math

Frankfurt airport is amazing, very modern, efficient, huge. Lufthansa/United star alliance hub with the best aircraft and most experienced flight attendants. Their lounges are huge as well, with nice food, pretzels and pickles! Its a different world compared to the dreadful Paris CDG or New York LaGuardia. 5 stars

This is the worst airport I have ever transited at. We flew Lufthansa. Never again. Their staff are incompetent, racist and unacceptably rude. Both the airline staff and the staff at the Airport doing security checks. They detained a Sikh gentleman and weren't able to give a valid reason for detaining him. This person was travelling with his family! When we kicked up a fuss about giving a valid reason for detaining him, they let him go. My children were scarred from seeing racism in action. Horrible. Never again will I go to Frankfurt. And we'll never travel Lufhansa again. Shameful.

We (a non-white family of four, parents and two kids) connected through Frankfurt, in transit from Rome. As we walked off the Lufthansa jet bridge two armed policemen were waiting right outside ... a whole slew of passengers walked past and we were in the process of doing the same. Suddenly the officers approached us and asked if we speak English. I said yes. They then asked for our passports. My wife asked why. They said they were doing a passport check. I took out our American passports and gave them to the officers. They spoke animatedly in German and then in a hostile manner shoved them back to us, and they walked away. We were the only ones singled out on that flight. I've traveled the world for thirty years, and never once encountered police officers asking me a single question. Our experience did not stop there. We had to go through passport control ("luckily" this was for everyone) ... but the officer there took a great deal of time going through our passport and asking questions about when we entered EU, which we answered. He reluctantly stamped our passports and handed them back. All the white passengers ahead of us breezed through with hardly a 15 second wait.

I was ashamed and humiliated at the way we were treated--not once, but twice. And we were simply transiting through!! I will avoid this airport and this airline at all costs. Terrible airport. Terrible officers. Terrible place.