Anytime I have the misfortune of having to change terminals at London Heathrow airport, it reminds me of just how much I hate it. Flight transfers can be very simple, but not at LHR.
On this trip I had to transfer from Terminal 5 to Terminal 3, as I was getting a flight to Billund in Denmark. I tend to block out previous experiences doing this, so it always comes as a surprise as to how annoying this whole thing is.
Heathrow Flight Transfers
Heathrow was designed in another era, meaning all the terminals are separate to one extent or another. This means that when you follow the purple Flight Connections signs to the other terminals, you actually go down to apron level and wait for a bus. These are relatively frequent and I usually don’t wait more than a few minutes (though they must pollute like mad!).
All well and good, so now I’m on the 10 minute or so drive around the bowels of Heathrow, often getting stuck behind slow moving baggage tractors, but eventually it’s time to get off at my new terminal.
There is an extremely long queue of people, all waiting like lambs to the slaughter to get to the top of the line. And god help you if you arrive around break time, where they take a good five to 10 minutes to change shifts while everyone stands there impatiently. In Terminal 3 on my last visit, this took a good 30 minutes to get through. Just what you want when you’ve just come in on and flight and have another one to go.
Overall Thoughts
Flight transfers at London Heathrow are the pits. Not only do you often have to get a bus to where you’re going, once there you have to wait in long slow moving queues to go through security screening again.
Look, I’m all for security screening, but I’ve noticed whenever I have to do this in a place like Doha, for example, there is a separate lane for first and business class passengers so you can pass straight through with almost no waiting. Why it is so difficult for Heathrow?
I don’t even think separate lanes are really required – what would be best would be to have all lanes utilised at peak times so people have no waiting time. 30 minutes is not good enough in my book, especially when you’ve already spent another 10-20 getting to the queue in the first place. A happy experience it is not.
What do you think of flight transfers at London Heathrow? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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All images via Heathrow Airport.
The hysteria about heathrow xfers is a little overblown. I have been through LHR 96 times in the last 10 years and never once missed a connection to security/transfer issues. Yeah, terminal 3 transfers can be pain but I don’t know if it’s worse than being redirected to normal security lines like at terminal 5.
I will never, EVER fly through there again if I can help it.
I totally agree about the security and the airport in general. I had the pleasure of getting the “pissed-off” security screener guy who actually started yelling (yes, yelling) at me. There was a person ahead of me and he kept telling me to “take the first bin” but that would be the person’s bin that was in front of me. He didn’t care. Just kept yelling at me. I fly everywhere, I’m experienced at flying and I’ve never seen anything like this, or this airport. Never again.