In my limited experience I cannot stress enough how much I prefer small regional airports.
Walk in, bags checked and through security in 5 minutes, walk a short distance through an area that’s not crowded and not full of shops, and be seated near the gate with a coffee a few minutes later. After a short wait, because you don’t need to get there an hour or more early, walk across a bit of open tarmac to a plane that’s not bursting at the seams, then take off after hardly any taxiing. So good.
Counterpoint to this is that security is bored as fuck and thinks everyone is a smuggler. We had to open and ruffle through our kids’ bag of Goldfish crackers and I saw security make a veteran empty his entire dufflebag on the security counter “just because” at the airport in Bismark, ND. Literally all 30 people (it was jam packed!) in line had to go through some form of “enhanced security”
In my limited experience I cannot stress enough how much I prefer small regional airports.
Walk in, bags checked and through security in 5 minutes, walk a short distance through an area that’s not crowded and not full of shops, and be seated near the gate with a coffee a few minutes later. After a short wait, because you don’t need to get there an hour or more early, walk across a bit of open tarmac to a plane that’s not bursting at the seams, then take off after hardly any taxiing. So good.
Counterpoint to this is that security is bored as fuck and thinks everyone is a smuggler. We had to open and ruffle through our kids’ bag of Goldfish crackers and I saw security make a veteran empty his entire dufflebag on the security counter “just because” at the airport in Bismark, ND. Literally all 30 people (it was jam packed!) in line had to go through some form of “enhanced security”