Hamburg Airport Terminal 2

Terminal 2 handles Star Alliance traffic including Lufthansa, and it is the busier of the two for scheduled European and domestic arrivals. Reclaim and the exit are on the ground floor.

The layout is the thing to understand, and it is unusual: Terminal 2 does not have its own separate arrivals hall in the way Frankfurt’s or Munich’s terminals do. It shares the ground-floor baggage reclaim with Terminal 1, and the Airport Plaza — a third building of shops and food — bridges the two a level up. In practice, arriving at Hamburg means arriving into one shared space with two names.

The Kiss & Fly zone is outside departures on Level 1 with ten free minutes, and P2 and P4 are the closest car parks at roughly €4 per half hour. Both serve either terminal, because at this airport there is not much sense in which they are separate places.

Your driver waits in arrivals with a name sign before you come through, working from your flight number. Hamburg is small enough and joined-up enough that this is straightforward, and we would rather spend the page saying what is actually true than inventing complexity.

What the fixed price buys here is the evening. Hamburg has a night flight curfew, so the arrivals bank compresses into the hours before it — everybody reaches the taxi rank at the same time. A car that is already booked does not care how long that queue is.

There is effectively no penalty for a terminal change at Hamburg. The shared baggage hall means you and your driver converge on the same floor of the same building whichever aircraft door you came out of. This is the most forgiving multi-terminal airport in the country, and it deserves saying plainly.