Rebecca H.
Yelp
Worst airport experience I have ever had and I've been to developing countries. I've been to 6 continents. Developing countries with the GDP of probably Rhode Island can do better than this.
If you travel and live in mid-northern Westchester, you know what a pain in the ass it is to get to one of the main airports. We are lucky enough to travel frequently and I decided to make our lives a little easier and book something out of this place instead.
Unfortunately, unless you're going to Florida, flying to/from this airport means you will probably have a layover. It seemed worth it for the convenience of the 20 min drive from our house.
This airport kicked things off on our Bourbon Trail trip. We had a flight at 5:15 to Charlotte after which we were catching the last flight of the day to Louisville. We arrived promptly for our flight at 3:15. A little foreshadowing, my Dad actually asked me while I was in the uber "is it crowded?"
Things started to smell off when we walked in the front doors and there was a line that literally wrapped around from one side of the small airport all the way down to the bag check area. Huh. It became apparent that this was the line to go through security.
We checked our bags. The lady who checked us in had a little bit of an attitude and could have benefitted from some patience but I've come to expect this kind of shit in NY.
Walking towards security is when I noticed what the line was for. No worries! I have TSA precheck. We walked up to the TSA precheck area, which was blocked off, and were told they are only taking people whose planes are literally at the gate, preparing to board. He directed us to the "back" of the room, that was completely filled with people by the way, where "our line" was located.
After weaving in and out of people and making our way to our supposed line, there was no line. I did ask someone about the existence of such line and she informed me she had been waiting for her flight that was due to take off at 9am. This was almost 3:30pm..
It turns out, there was some fog that delayed a bunch of flights and everything got clogged. The problem is that there were so many people waiting and only a handful of gates, there wasn't enough room for everyone. If you wanted to do something other than stand for hours, you had to find a piece of floor to sit on. It was insanity and quite unpleasant to say the least.
The way one would find out when they should go through security and therefore, need to board their flight soon, was this woman with the 80s haircut walking around shouting what flight numbers they were accepting through TSA. There was one point when they shouted our flight number and we went to line up just for me to realize that it was DELTA 5070 and not my AA 5070 they were boarding. It was completely absurd.
We finally went through security after what seemed like eternity of misery. We found a spot to sit on to lean against something, the thing we were leaning against was literally the baggage claim belt, no joke, because there was literally no other place. Because of this location, I was able to overhear a lot of the people on arriving flights bitching about how long they had to sit in the plane on the taxiway because there just werent' enough gates. It was such a backup of flights, one of the flights had to DIVERT TO JFK before ultimately coming to HPN.
After making it through security, I was literally starving and thirsty so I went to the only place, a small store with snacks.
They changed the gate our flight was leaving from a few times but a different gate was listed on the board. It was a complete mess.
Needless to say, I would never again fly from here if it was the last airport on earth.
Oh, and because our flight was delayed so much (2 hours or so) we missed our connecting flight and had to pay for an extra night in a hotel.
