Ruihai Y.
Google
You know how your airline tells you to show up 3–5 hours early for your flight, you aim for 1.5 and still spend 45 minutes at your gate watching people buy 400% marked-up candy bars?
Do not do this at Lima International Airport. The space is designed to suck all happy memories out of you through a series of procedures and lines so badly thought out you'll question how this country once built irrigation systems through the mountains.
First, you'll experience a single highway entrance that requires a U-turn in bumper-to-bumper traffic. This is the new, better entrance to the redesigned terminal, which leaves you to imagine the original was a 17° inclined tar pit.
The hundreds of kiosks just don't work, so off you go to one of 7 checkin/bag drop/mini-immigration lines. This will be your first experience of the Jorge Chavez staffing system, wherein for every one (1) employee dedicated to processing passengers through a checkpoint, two (2) employees are in charge of making random lanes, moving passengers through lines, and repeatedly shouting instructions at them. Do not think about how, if every bag drop was staffed with the actual number of employees present, there would be no line. Do not think about how people in the bag drop line don't have bag tags. Do not ask the line makers why the lines exist. Surrender. Embrace bumper-to-bumper traffic.
If you experienced a 100+ minute wait on the way in (a universal experience per every foreigner we talked to on our trip), the pleasure is the same on the way out. Outgoing passport control is as follows: line to check your boarding pass, line to scan your boarding pass, line to get to security, line to get to your assigned lane, line in your assigned lane, passport control. There are 6+ lanes, and they don't all go to the same passport control. This system demands 50+ line makers regardless of the number of border agents (in our case, 3).
Sometimes, you get the special passport control where they fingerprint you five times before realizing they are matching your prints to some completely different passenger. So then you're holding up the line by 33% while some line maker behind you yells at people to go faster. To where?
The stringent security (no hats, no phones, no leaving 3" of space between linees) while ensuring you leave the country is in and of itself enough—the document control bit is irrelevant. Anybody who goes through the humiliation ritual that is Lima International departures is NEVER coming back by choice.
Also the shopping sucks, there are like 3 charging ports, and half the bathrooms are broken. Happy travels!
Pictured: despair in Lima