London Luton Airport Reviews 

Weather warm outside? You bet it's an oven in the airport. Continental airports have actual working air conditioning, but not here.
Adequate seating for the inevitable delays? Not a chance. Unless you want to pay £7.50 for a drink in one of the many establishments. All available floorspace is given up to ways of parting you with your money, don't expect to get a set while you're waiting for your 5 hr delayed flight though.

I took a flight and left my jacket at the airport, contacted and contacted and eventually got a form to complete online. I was sent a link to keep checking if the item I had left showed up on the spreadsheet, it did. I put in a claim for said jacket, a few days later I had heard nothing so contacted Luggage-Point again only to get an auto email to say they are no longer dealing with Luton Airport, no other contact details or info on who is. They were still dealing with lost property at the time I made the claim. I have Googled and Luton Airport are still pointing me to Luggage-Point, I have rang all the numbers I can find but never get a reply. I appreciate this is a busy airport but surely the web page should have correct details? this has been going on since my flight on 5th June!! I am at a loss now on how to get my jacket back. You would expect to go to their own site and find the details you need. The number I have now been given by Google seems to be right but you never get a answer, the message tells you to go to lost property pages and complete a report but again still has the details for a company who do not deal with this issue. Very poor service.

Drop Off Rip Off.
Just to drop someone off near the airport you now have to pay - £7. But worse than that they've partnered with APCOA parking and you can't pay at the terminal. You have to pay when you get home via an online link. If you forget to do this they slap you with a threatening letter and £95 fee, reduced to £25 if you pay withing 14 days.

£7 to £95 to £25 - a pure scam.

This process is a pure money making exercise and it's sad to see people being ripped off like this.

Shame on you Luton airport.

Staff were amazing and really helpful. I have mobility needs and I was transported to the plane by a member of staff on the way there. Got through security really quickly as well and on the way back I was helped off the plane and driven rather than trying to do the long walk. I was given a wheelchair and went quickly through passport control, bags off the plane really quickly as well and I was wheeled straight up to the car park by the member of staff. Well done guys and thank you ☺️

Absolute sh*thole of a place. Landed on time but then a 15-20 minute wait for the buses to take us to the terminal building to join the 45 minute queue for passport control. Needless to say won’t be back. 1 star is more than generous.

We travelled Sunday to Sunday with my Autistic son who is 24 and wore a sunflower lanyard saying he was autistic on it.
The queues were horrendous and no one took any notice or offered help both when we departed and arrived. Most staff were too busy looking at their phones.
Made worse by all the signs saying are sunflower lanyard aware.
This is our worst experience in any uk of foreign airport.

If only the same effort that goes into retail and car parking at Luton went into toilet and seating provision. It’s just a horrible place to have to wait for a flight. Queues for the toilets because they are too few for the high traffic and jam packed seating.

Fast track security on Sunday may 17th was an absolute joke . Only 1 belt open which was so busy it came to a Complete standstill. And your staff need a lesson in customer experience. Just because your friends are late and their cases needs further investigation don’t just let them push in front of everyone . We all have to wait our turn..but your managers on duty were a disgrace and were not remotely interested. Sort it out….we pay to use this facility AND ITS JUST A COMPLETE JOKE

The pick up drop off is total chaos. Traffic is backed up on the airport approach road. Pedestrian flow crosses the traffic preventing vehicle flow. Vehicles wanting to leave are blocked by others waiting to park. It is an appalling layout designed to ensure even the quickest drop off can exceed the basic time allowed before excess charges are applied.

Luton Airport and sustainability - not really - masses of cheap plastic bottles on sale, and just one point to fill your bottle. Shame

Mid stay car park, charged £15 for a 3 minute stay while dropping a family member off - Heathrow & Gatwick (far superior airports) don’t even charge that much. Absolute rip off and won’t be using airport again.

I’m not one for negative review but Luton Airport is honestly one of the worst airport experiences I’ve had. The entire terminal feels completely overcrowded from the moment you enter. There are people everywhere, barely enough room to move, and almost nowhere to sit down because every available seat is taken. It feels like the airport is operating far beyond what it can comfortably handle.

The pricing inside the terminal is also an absolute rip off. Food, drinks, and basic essentials are outrageously expensive, and passengers are effectively trapped inside with little alternative once through security.

The biggest issue, however, is the poor gate management. Gates appear to be announced unnecessarily late, leaving huge crowds of passengers packed into the central terminal area for long periods of time. It genuinely creates the impression that passengers are intentionally kept near the shops, bars, and restaurants for as long as possible to maximise spending opportunities rather than improve the travel experience.

At some point, leadership seriously needs to ask itself whether this airport is being run for passengers or for spreadsheets. The experience feels like it is being managed by accountants staring at bar graphs and revenue targets instead of people who actually understand customer service, comfort, and operational flow. Passenger experience should come before squeezing every possible pound out of overcrowded terminals.

The toilets and queue management were equally terrible. Long queues everywhere, poor organisation, and facilities that clearly cannot cope with the number of people using them. The whole airport experience felt stressful, chaotic, and badly managed from start to finish.

Luton Airport needs leadership that prioritises efficiency, comfort, and passenger wellbeing instead of profits at all costs. Until that changes, I would strongly recommend travellers use a different airport wherever possible because this one is absolutely terrible.

Extremely disappointing experience at London Luton Airport Departure security.

Today there were two parallel security queues operating side by side, but the right-side queue was moving approximately four times slower than the left one for no visible reason.

We spent over 60 minutes standing in line and still had not even reached the actual security screening area, while passengers in the neighboring queue continued moving much faster.

What made the situation worse was the complete lack of communication and coordination from staff. Nobody explained the delays, nobody redirected passengers, and there appeared to be no effort to manage the flow fairly.

This created unnecessary stress, frustration, and a real concern about missing flights.

For a major international airport serving London, this level of organization is simply unacceptable.

Luton Airport is truly a masterpiece of modern airport priorities — a shining example of how to extract every possible pound from passengers while giving almost nothing back once they arrive.

The airport authorities have clearly spared no expense when it comes to things that generate revenue: beautiful multi-storey car parks, fast rail links, endless taxi access, shiny bus stations, shops, bars, restaurants and premium drop-off zones everywhere you look. Departing passengers are treated like valued guests — because they still have money left to spend.

Arriving passengers, however, are a completely different story.

The moment you land, you instantly transform from “valued customer” into “human cargo”. You are funnelled into endless queues, herded through overcrowded corridors and left standing for hours in conditions that would embarrass many third-world transport hubs.

Apparently, the airport’s solution to this problem is fresh paint, motivational stickers on the walls and new floor markings — because clearly what exhausted passengers trapped in a 1.5-hour passport queue really need is colourful branding while they slowly lose the will to live.

I have watched this airport expand for over 20 years. Every year there are new ways to charge passengers more money. New retail areas. New parking systems. New transport links. New ways to monetise every square metre of space.

And yet, after two decades, absolutely nothing meaningful has been done to improve the arrival experience or the completely unacceptable passport control bottlenecks.

Why? Because arriving passengers are no longer useful. They have already paid for parking, transport, food and airport services. Financially speaking, they are now worthless to the airport.

It is genuinely embarrassing that outside peak season, the arrival of just three aircraft can completely paralyse passport control and block the entire terminal. Waiting over 90 minutes simply to clear border control is not an “operational challenge” — it is a failure of management, planning and basic respect for passengers.

During summer, these waiting times regularly double or even triple, yet somehow this continues to be treated as normal.

At what point do the airport authorities finally decide that arriving passengers deserve the same level of investment, planning and respect as departing ones?

Or is the strategy simply:
“Thanks for your money — now stand in line and suffer quietly.”

Airport that runs parking scams on the side. It is not bad enough that you need to pay £7 for dropping someone off, but you have to pay online - which is slow and flimsy. No option to pay at the airport and people a lot of the time do not remember to pay and then have to pay £60 fine which is exactly what they planned. Was visiting Luton when they had payment machines and there were never any congestion, so this is deliberate to scam money out of people who just dropped off or picked up relatives and will not be thinking about paying when they get back home. Scummy corporations are getting even scummier.

I had a very disappointing experience with Luton Airport Parking regarding an overstay charge. The email confirmation instructions are misleading, as they strongly imply that the overstay charge must be paid in advance, when in reality it is significantly cheaper to pay onsite.
After following the email instructions, I later discovered the price difference and had to make several complaints before I eventually received a refund of the difference. While the money was corrected in the end, the time and effort wasted chasing this issue was completely unnecessary.
Clear and accurate instructions should be provided upfront. Instead, the process feels misleading and puts the burden on customers to identify the problem, chase repeatedly, and raise complaints.
I have since raised formal complaints with both Luton Airport and APCOA, which are still pending, but this situation is unacceptable. Customers should not have to escalate complaints simply to avoid being overcharged due to unclear or misleading communications.

I would earnestly suggest that Luton Airport is the very worst airport in Europe. It should be utterly demolished. You arrive on a plane from North Africa [Tunisia] which has totally modernised airports, and you arrive at London-Luton at an airport that is totally unfit for the 21st Century.

After your plane arrives at Luton, you have to clamber down a mobile ladder onto the apron where the plane has arrived. You then have to walk 75 metres to a walkway leading to the arrivals building. You are forced to climb a staircase upstairs to a corridor leading to Passport Control. The corridor is long and windy [about 500 metres]. At the end of this corridor you have to go downstairs, goosey, goosey gander-fashion: upstairs downstairs in my lady's chamber-fashion.

You then arrive at Passport Control in a room whose size is unfit for purpose which looks more like a farmers' Saturday market for livestock. you then pass though onto the Baggage delivery room which is also completely of a size unfit for purpose, where the baggage belts handle the arrival of luggage from 3 or 4 planes. Chaos results.

The toilets stink in this area. And you have to pay for luggage trolleys [cheap-skatery].

This is a municipally-run airport. I would not want to move to Luton if all its public services were run like its airport.

Dropped wife off at 5.30AM at usual drop off/pick up point, only to be charged £15 for a 60 second stay. Nobody there to question either. Whoever thought this was a reasonable and respectful way to treat patrons should tender their resignation and return to their hole in the ground. Shocking.

I was searched at Luton airport because the alarm went off in security for no apparent reason. The security person patted down the front of my trousers and put his bare hands inside my underwear to feel round the waistband. When he could find nothing he just waved me on with a flick of the hand. I was so disgusted I took the train home so I wouldn't have to set foot in that airport again. I wrote a complaint which they responded saying their officer had done nothing wrong. I wrote back twice asking for a manager to review (which they say is the next step if you have an unsatisfactory reply). They never contacting me again. Despicable service. The worst airport I've been to. Avoid!!!

Airport security staff are so rude. Unnecessary they have a hard job, but no regard to the passengers who at the end of the day are there clients