Steve Takata
Google
The Austin airport is my home airport, and while it is not my favorite, it is not bad either. Having lived in Austin for a long time, I remember the days when it was a very small airport near 51st St., and you could park in the neighborhoods outside the airport, and walk to the gate in 10 minutes from your street parking spot! But Austin has grown several fold since then and it understandably needed a bigger and better location. This is still an easy location to get to as long as you’re not commuting during peak rush-hour. The parking is simple, and for the economy parking you can walk in to the terminals from most of the lots in less than 10 minutes. Economy lot parking is affordable at $12 a day now, but it’s not the great deal it used to be 10 or 12 years ago, when it was five dollars a day and the economy lot was literally across the street from the terminal and you could walk there in 30 seconds. Generally, it’s faster and better to walk in from your parking spot than to wait for the shuttles, because the shuttles are unpredictable. Sometimes they arrive in one minute, but there have been times that I waited so long That I could’ve walked all the way to the terminal and back before the shovel came! The rental car area is a two or three minute walk from the airport terminals which is great if you need to rent a car, unlike a lot of airports where you need to take a 15 minute or longer bus ride to the airport rental locations. The food in the airport is pretty good, and is mostly a bunch of local Central Texas restaurants. For the most part, their food is not quite as good at the airport location as their real locations in town and is Grotesquely overpriced, as most airport food is. The biggest problem with the Austin airport is that they had the idea that to expand they would open a second small terminal down south. As the crow flies, it is may be only a mile or so away, but because of the way the shuttle buses need to run, it can take the better part of an hour to get between the main terminal, and the south terminal. If you are flying out of one of the two and back to the other one, plan ahead. You can leave your card either one, but if you wanna leave it at the one you’re going to be arriving to when you come home, Give yourself an hour to drop the car off there and get back to the other terminal to catch your flight out. They should’ve come up with a better plan for this. Los Angeles has a little auxiliary terminal that’s connected by a shuttle bus, which is done much better and you can get between in five or 10 minutes. Those shuttles run literally through the airport, so I don’t know if there is a way to do that in Austin, but in a case they didn’t. The other thing is if you are flying out of gate one or 32, budget yourself a little bit of time to walk from the security all the way down to the most distant gates. I would give yourself 10 minutes or so, maybe longer if you are slow walker, or if you’re gonna stop to grab something on the way. There are no moving walkways in the Austin airport to speed things up so plan accordingly.