Who has not had a terrible experience at the airport?

On Thursday, while sitting at Soekarno-Hatta Airport in Jakarta, a colleague posted a nightmarish experience on Facebook at Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne.

Like many others, I expressed my sympathy. Who has not had a terrible experience at the airport?

I spend a little more time in airports and on planes than in most cases. While I was wasting my time at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport while waiting for a delayed flight to Chiang Rai, I recently created a spreadsheet to calculate the exact time.

Since January 10, 2018 – my first visit to Jakarta – my destinations also include Mataram, Palu, Denpasar, Mamuju and Makbadar in Indonesia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Singapore, Bangkok and Chiang Rai in Thailand; and Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth and Tamworth in Australia.

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It turns out that in mid-June, I will have taken 89 flights, a flight every six days or so, for 18 months. This is one of the least exciting aspects of my job (using squatting toilets and wearing the same dirty clothes for days is also good).

But it gives me enough time to think and observe. My experiences at the airport went from the most bbad to the most tragic.

Don Mueang, Bangkok Airport, a cheap airline that I usually frequent, is terrible. There are a lot of people, the range of dishes offered is very limited, both the newsstand and duty-free offerings are minimal, it is old and the doors from which planes leave change frequently, which means that you regularly go back and forth. The only highlight is a children's play area of ​​reasonable size.

Terminal 2 at Soekarno-Hatta Airport in Jakarta is not far behind. It suffers compared to the brand new and bright terminal 3 (you'll love the T3 if you count the steps). But Terminal 2 is aging and offers a limited number of food and duty-free products.

I am confident that a recently announced plan to make T2 a terminal reserved for low-cost carriers – halving the number of check-in desks, removing duties and turning off air-conditioning (remember you, the temperature in Jakarta is permanently -32 degrees) will make it the worst terminal in Southeast Asia. I am very confident to predict that I will never try to leave T2 again.

The third most degraded place is Dhaka airport, disorganized, with few shops selling everything you would like to buy, and guards with machine guns that add a thrill without which I could do without.

The best experience? Singapore, hands down. Everything works well.

The airport of Phnom Penh is relatively modern, ATMs distribute all US dollars (no one seems to use the local currency), but loses points because of visa procedures upon arrival. If you do not have a pbadport size photo and 35 US $ (52 NZD), be prepared to wait a moment.

Kuala Lumpur is also very useful, but among the best airports, I give Chiang Rai third place. It's small, old, disorganized and the food and shopping options are not very good. But none of this matters. It has an old-school charm, it's the gateway to a spectacularly beautiful part of Thailand that more people should visit, and it's small enough that everything is done with the minimum of fuss.

But good or bad, airports are places where separations and arrivals occur, where people are mourning or exalted. And, on two occasions, these are the places where I have seen traumatized people desperate to escape.

The first took place in Palu, Indonesia, just days after the earthquake and tsunami that struck the region. The devastation was visible from the air. Cracks were evident on the runway and the terminal partially collapsed.

Residents, many of whom were seriously injured, were desperately trying to catch the plane.

I have never seen anything like it and I hope I never do it again. At the end of a week, like hundreds of other people, I spent more than 24 hours at the airport trying to get a flight.

The 7am flight that I had booked had been taken by a group of pbadengers supposed to be on the 7am flight the day before. The backlog that the airlines had to eliminate was huge and the staff was doing it without proper computer systems.

Like hundreds of other people, I slept on the airport grounds to try my luck the next day. My bed was a concrete slab on the outside of a broken sanitary block, my floor mat an unused body bag that a rescue team had given me.

After being knocked over again for a commercial flight, a friendly airport manager boarded a small eight-seater charter plane to the small town of Mamuju, just below the coast. I was very lucky and very grateful.

And there was Mataram, the capital of Lombok, where I arrived the day after the earthquake. There is something surreal about walking in a damaged arrival hall to get to chaotic places and where hundreds of locals and tourists are trying to escape.

I remember the look of horror on the face of a woman that I had stopped interviewing. The first thing she said to me, after hearing my accent, was that a counter meant to help the Australians was simply finished. "I just arrived, I'm not leaving," I say.

These are the moments I remember when I'm stuck in transit.

What was your worst airport terminal experience? Let us know in the comments below.