I thought I'd leave some comments here about Berlin-Brandenburg, based on my experience of it a couple of months ago:
- It is very, very badly designed from a user perspective. For instance, there are pillars right in front of some check-in desks, and there's simply not enough space to queue for...anything.
- There are very few moving walkways, which means that there are lengthy walks.
- Signage is very poor and unclear.
- The gate areas are just too small, especially if flights are departing from adjacent gates.
- There's a lack of seating, especially in the central airside part of T1.
- The observation deck is frankly awful and paid for.
- There's nothing to eat in the restaurants airside (in this sense, it's comparable to the New Istanbul Airport).
- Security lines are a mess at peak times, not helped by the stubborn refusal to open up the security checkpoints before 4am when there are flights departing from 5:40am.
- Getting through security is incredibly slow.
- There's no possibility to pay for fast track security, which is insane.
- The actual design of the security checkpoints is poor, as someone being stopped holds up the rest of the queue.
I miss Schönefeld. I never waited more than 5 minutes there to go through security, there were reasonable places to eat, and although small, the security checkpoints were well designed.
I have absolutely no idea who designed BER, but it's painfully obvious that they had never done such a job before. Or, as I suspect, Wowereit and friends had no idea what it was like to use an airport as an ordinary civilian.