Four German airports that are not where their name says

Frankfurt-Hahn is about 120 km from Frankfurt, in the Hunsrück — a different region of a different state. The name dates from the 1990s, when a former US air base needed a city travellers had heard of.

Memmingen is 110 km from Munich, in the Allgäu, and is marketed against Munich anyway. Weeze is 77 km from Düsseldorf Airport and was sold for years as "Düsseldorf-Weeze" until a court ruled in 2016 that the name was likely to mislead passengers — the only one of the four where the question has actually been tested in law.

Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden is the subtlest. It is genuinely 12 km from Baden-Baden, which is a reasonable airport-to-city distance by any standard. But the name puts Karlsruhe first, and Karlsruhe is 40 km away. The airport is not misnamed so much as mis-ordered, which is harder to notice.

A new airport with no traffic needs to appear in searches for somewhere people want to go. "Hunsrück Airport" and "Allgäu Airport" describe the location accurately and sell very little; "Frankfurt-Hahn" and "Memmingen (Munich West)" do the opposite. The naming is a demand-generation decision, and from the airport’s point of view it worked.

The cost is borne by the passenger who takes the name literally. The classic version is someone who books a cheap flight to "Frankfurt", lands at 22:30 in a village in the Hunsrück, and discovers that the last coach has gone and the city on the ticket is two hours away. That is not a rare event; it is a predictable consequence of the naming.

It is worth being precise about the harm, though. The airports are not badly run and the flights are not worse. The problem is purely informational: a name that carries a claim about location, and a passenger who reasonably believed it.

They are well-placed regional airports with a city’s name stapled on. Once you look at what is actually near them, the picture changes completely.

Hahn is the closest airport to the Mosel — Bernkastel-Kues is 29 km away, Cochem 41, Sankt Goar 45. For a wine holiday or a river cruise it beats Frankfurt comfortably. Memmingen is closer to Neuschwanstein, Oberstdorf, the Allgäu and Lake Constance than Munich is; for a skier or a walker it is the right airport, not a compromise.

Weeze is 33 km from Nijmegen and 48 from Duisburg, so the Netherlands and the northern Ruhr are both nearer than the city it borrowed — a substantial share of its passengers are Dutch, travelling in the opposite direction to what the name implies. Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden opens the northern Black Forest and, across the Rhine, Alsace and Strasbourg.

Check the distance to your actual destination before you book the flight, not after you collect your bag. This takes thirty seconds and it is the entire remedy. The airport’s own website will tell you; so will a map.

If your destination really is the city on the name, budget for a journey rather than a transfer — a coach or a train, an hour or more, and a connection that may not exist late at night. Then compare that total against flying into the actual city airport, which may well cost more in fare and less in everything else.

If your destination is the region, you have landed in the right place and the drive is short. That is the good case, and it is more common than the horror stories suggest: most people flying to Memmingen are going to the Allgäu, and most people flying to Hahn in summer are going to the Mosel.

One practical note either way: at all four of these airports the onward public transport thins out or stops in the evening, and low-cost schedules put a lot of arrivals there. Whatever you decide, check the last departure of whatever you are planning to use against the arrival time of your actual flight.