Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS) - Day and Night

https://www.schiphol.nl/en/

I documented my hatred of Frankfurt pretty thoroughly the last time I went to Europe:

http://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-i-hate-frankfurt-airport.html

At the time I had mentioned wanting to go through Amsterdam, but it had been too expensive. This time it worked out; we passed through Amsterdam on our way both to and from Italy. I knew it was still a big airport, and could still be terrible, but I had to hope.

I ended up having two fairly different experiences, for different reasons.

We were not supposed to go through Amsterdam on the way there, but flood control measures caused our original connection through JFK to be delayed two hours, which made the connection impossible.We were rerouted, along with many others.

Schiphol is huge, and it was full of people, many of whom had been rerouted. We ended up next to two people out of a group of six who all ended up connecting through different airports. We still got to our final destination and at the originally scheduled time, plus no luggage was lost, so things could have been much worse. It nonetheless made the airport very crowded and chaotic.

I was worried about making our connection, and my mother's knees were really hurting. I did not think I could get her to the plane quickly enough on my own. I had not scheduled a wheelchair, but I started to wish I had. I thought I should at least ask.

There was a man answering questions. I asked him and he directed me to the information booth, and then a woman there directed me to the office where they handled those services. They did not have anyone free since I had not prearranged the service, but they could loan me a wheelchair.

This was still pretty stressful. I had to go to three different places and drag my hurting mother with me, because I was sure that if I tried to have her wait somewhere with me I would never see her again. However, each person gave me an answer that took me in the right direction, and getting the wheelchair was resolved pretty quickly. This already makes them better than Frankfurt. I sat my mother in the wheelchair and started to book it.

Here is another way that Schiphol was superior to Frankfurt: while the lines were very long, they had someone at the start of the line asking people for their flight times and sending people along in the order that made everyone most likely to catch their flight. He was asking about 9:45 flight times when I got there, and we were 9:35, so that felt like a bad sign. However he moved us ahead, and let us go to the head (with the help of another employee) because of the wheelchair.

Although Mom was truly hurting (the multiple hours spent in the plane did not help), I did have some hopes that the wheelchair could get us through faster, and it did. I am grateful for that. I am also grateful that in Amsterdam you do not keep changing floor levels, because constantly having to find elevators and wait for them would have killed a lot of the wheelchair's advantage. As it was, I arrived very tired and sweaty, and we probably still would have missed the plane if the other changes hadn't made it take off about fifteen minutes late, but by the skin of our teeth, we made it. I had to consider them a superior airport.

Then I spent the night there.

The outbound trip had dangerously short layovers, but on the return trip the layovers were quite long, including one from 9 PM to 9 AM in Amsterdam. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have twelve hours to explore Amsterdam, but most of what I am interested in is closed at night.

I had looked into options for sleeping at the airport. There were two hotels actually in the airport and several nearby, but I just couldn't decide what was best. That our flight details had changed so much may have made me more hesitant to commit. I decided to figure it out when we got there, but this was a bad idea.

I had no idea how much the airport shut downs at night. While there may be less flights coming in at night, they do still come. There was a mass of people getting off of our plane, so right after disembarking felt busy. As they all left the airport businesses were shutting down, including information desks.

I was speaking with some locals on the flight and they were talking about how the airport is so busy that instead of two hours you allow three, maybe four if you are international. So for a 9AM departure, I would not want to be later than 6AM, and maybe 5AM. The trains don't start running until 6:30 AM, and then the traffic gets really bad at 7. That did not mean it would be impossible to make it back if we left the airport for a hotel, but it made time more of a concern, on top of the financial concerns.

We'd already been on two flights. While they were short, we had already waited for six hours for Rome and two in Verona. My mother was getting disoriented, and my blood sugar suddenly plunged. I took a glucose tablet and ate a sandwich I had saved, but we needed food and rest, and we were unsuccessful in finding either.

Information attendants were gone for the night. There were self-service kiosks, but they would not give me information about the two hotels. I tried opening up my laptop, but the airport wifi stalled and I could not get the page to load. That left asking people who were still around the airport. That did not go as well. We wandered around and around, getting farther from where we needed to be, and passing by places we should have stayed that we could not find again.

(There was a lounge with something that looked like foam recliners. We should have just parked there for the night.)

This meant ending up on the wrong side of security, and thus having to go through it again. It may have meant going in circles, but I am not sure. We did eventually find one of the airport hotels and it was full. We ended up taking some chairs near a table and trying to put our feet up, maybe getting two hours of sleep. I had to be very stern with my mother, and we did not actually end up with any other food until about 5 AM the next morning. We survived, but it was a rough night, and the realization of how many hours we needed to get through made it worse.

Based on that, I didn't feel quite as good about Amsterdam. If you are not stuck there at night it is fine, and you can manage stuck there at night better than we did, but we also passed many people leaning on suitcases while we were wandering. For what it's worth, no one hassles you for sleeping out in the open. It does feel pretty vulnerable.

What I wish I had done now was booked one of the airport hotels in advance and booked a wheelchair, not just to make things easier for my mother but to have someone who knew where things were to get us there.

For a separate visit to Amsterdam in the future, well, okay, the airport may get busy, but I would probably be staying at a hotel then. The hotel staff would almost certainly be able to recommend the best way to get to the airport and when to leave for my departing flight, so that's how I would handle that.

Still better than Frankfurt.

I wish I had pictures of the crowds on that first morning, and the vast emptiness of that night, but in stressful situations you don't necessarily think of stopping to take photos, especially when you are pushing a wheelchair at a not quite run. So here is the one photo I did take, after we had breakfasted and found our gate and learned there was going to be one more slight delay: a giant Miffy with Mickey: