Was anyone at BER today and witnessed the chaos? Did it ruin anyone's vacation?

yeah i was there picking up my parents around 2pm, absolute mess at the arrivals hall too. the taxi queue stretched all the way past the bus stop, took me 25 minutes just to get to the pickup zone. honestly the biggest fuckup was the digital signage, half the monitors were showing cancelled flights that were actually fine, so people were rebooking for no reason. if u live here and have friends landing this week, tell them to just walk out and call a cab from the street instead of waiting in that line, it's way faster. also the little kiosk near the S-Bahn entrance that sells pretzels and coffee stayed open the whole time, that saved my ass.

arrow_drop_up 5 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

The chaos was real, but I think the bigger story is how the airport handled the ripple effect. I flew out of BER yesterday evening, and even though the system was supposedly back up, every single flight was still running 90 minutes behind. The ground crew was clearly doing their best, but the real bottleneck was the baggage handling, our luggage took forever to even get onto the belt at the destination. For anyone still stuck, I'd skip the airport food court entirely, the currywurst stand near the B gates was the only place with a reasonable line and decent prices. Also, if you're relying on the DB app for updates, don't, it kept showing my flight as on time while the airport screens said delayed.

arrow_drop_up 5 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

I got stuck there around 11am waiting for a friend's flight from Mallorca, and honestly the worst part wasn't the delay itself, it was the total lack of info at the S-Bahn platform. People were just milling around, no announcements in English either, so a lot of tourists had no clue if their flight even existed anymore. Check-in counters looked like a Lidl on Saturday morning, but the security lines actually moved faster than usual once they got the hand-checking going. My advice: if you're flying out this week, get to BER at least three hours early, bring snacks, and download the airport app for push notifications, the screens inside were lagging behind reality by like 40 minutes.

arrow_drop_up 2 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

arrow_drop_up 4 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

arrow_drop_up 3 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply

honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

arrow_drop_up 1 arrow_drop_down

chat_bubble Reply ios_share

/

Reply