Munich Airport Terminal 1

Terminal 1 is not one hall. It is a row of modules — A, B, C, D and E — and each has its own check-in, its own baggage reclaim and its own set of exit doors. Modules A to D handle both departures and arrivals; module E handles arrivals only. Walking from one end of the row to the other with luggage is a serious walk, not a stroll, and it is the reason "meet me at Terminal 1" is an incomplete instruction at this airport.

Arrivals are on Level 03. That is consistent across the terminal, so the level is never the question — the module always is. Terminal 1 takes the carriers outside Star Alliance, which in practice means most of the low-cost and leisure traffic and a good deal of the short-haul European schedule.

Outside, Munich gives ten free minutes on the forecourt, twice per calendar day. There is a trap in it worth knowing: leaving and re-entering counts as a new stop and is charged, so circling the block while somebody finds their bags is the expensive version of waiting. Short-term parking is €5 for a quarter of an hour, €10 for half, €20 for the hour.

Your driver waits inside the arrivals area of the module your flight actually uses, with a name sign, taken from the live flight rather than from your booking. At an airport where the modules are the unit and the ticket only names the terminal, that is not a refinement — it is the difference between being met and being telephoned.

Munich is also 28.5 km from the city, the largest airport-to-city gap of any German hub. The consequence is that improvising here is expensive in a way it is not at Bremen or Nuremberg: there is no short taxi ride to fall back on, and the S-Bahn from under the terminals, while genuinely good, is a long ride with skis or four suitcases.

If you land at Terminal 2 instead, the driver moves — we track the flight, so a reassignment is our problem before it is yours. If you need to make the journey yourself, the two terminals are adjacent and connected landside, so it is a walk rather than a train. Within Terminal 1, a module change is the more common event and the more annoying one, which is exactly why we take the module from the arrival and not from the itinerary.