Edinburgh Airport — Local services in City of Edinburgh

Arrival: Endless crowds at the airport in front of the passport control, it was a bit like arriving at LAX... I wasn't sure if I was in a good line, because some people went to the automated booths, some to the immigration officers, and it seemed to be the same line. The automated booth let me in without hesitation, but several others from the same plane did not, including my husband. One minute he was behind me, the next he disappeared somewhere. After an hour he finally showed up, apparently even the officials didn't know why the automated booths weren't taking some EU passports... so they had to go to immigration, where of course there were already people from all over the world with all sorts of problems, so it took an awful long time.

So in the meantime I was looking for the shuttle bus stop that would take us to the car rental place... I would have expected to find a map of the airport and the bus stops somewhere to help me find my way around if I was visiting the airport for the first time. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't find one. I walked up and down the streets of Scotland :D with this huge suitcase, I've been everywhere, but I couldn't find stop 1 anywhere... There was A, B, C... 2, 3, 4.... Trams, shopping centre, but not number 1... Outside it was bitterly cold for a while, raining, blowing, then the sun was shining, then it rained again... undress, dress, undress, dress...

It's great that the pavements at the airport are already well marked with different arrows, so that you have to walk on the opposite side from us (not GB, New Zealand... ones), so that people don't bump into each other... Of course, the vast majority of people and the world ignored this wherever they could... On the sidewalks of the airport, on the footpaths...

Departure: They have internet at the airport, although it was often disconnected and I had to re-login. Plastic bags for liquids were regularly offered at the security checkpoint and on the way through the security line. Great!!! Although by law all GB airports should have new scanners by now where you don't have to unload liquids, EDI (and many other UK airports) have not yet qualified. I have no idea what I was suspicious of, but almost every single thing in my hand luggage was thoroughly checked and put through the scanner again. My husband, who had a drone, 2 large cameras, 5 lenses, a million flashes, chargers, cables, 2 tripods... in his suitcase, went through completely unchallenged. Mostly they examined lenses, cameras... now they were interested in my backpack, my Kindle. It took an endless amount of time to go through everything and have everything scanned again, one by one. There was a shortage of seats at the airport, so I checked the web to see if the gate information would appear in front of the board. I also subscribed to the Facebook Messages service for my flight to get the latest information.

As in many other airports around the world, it was confirmed that the update was on the web at least 10-20 minutes before it was on the board or Facebook message... Luckily, we were already comfortably seated in front of our gate when the gate appeared on the board and hordes of other...

We arrived in to Edinburgh Airport from Warsaw at approximately 6.20pm on Sunday 13th July 2025.  It is fair to say that it is more the airport operations that let us down, this is by far no complaint in regards to staff. Indeed, of the three interactions we had with airport staff (passport control/Pret worker and disabled customer assistant) we had very good service, friendly helpful and polite. However, operationally we were not impressed with the airport. On arrival in to the baggage reclaim, it felt somewhat like a "bun fight", there were more than one flight arrivals in this small area and the cases took an excessive amount of time to be loaded on to the belt. There was little seating to be had hence this exasperated the wait.  This is not our first experience of Edinburgh airport and this baggage collection area, our last experience in June 2023 was similar, when our flight was 4 hours late in arriving and the baggage reclaim area being excessively full of travellers and delays which resulted in us being unable to get home the evening.  On this occasion, we managed through passport control relatively quickly due to my disability, yet the queues were long for those who had to wait.  After coming through passport control, I headed for the toilets near to Costa, they were significantly unclean.  Perhaps just the time of day, however there is really no need for public toilets to be unclean as we found through our recent trip to Poland where the airport toilets and train/bus station toilets were all kept impeccably clean.   Though throughout the airport, particularly upstairs near to Pret and Nero, there was a noticable smell of urine, it smelled as though the same mop had been used in the bathrooms as in the general areas, or perhaps it was just the stench from the significantly unclean bathrooms on both floors in these areas of the airport.  These  experiences  made me feel somewhat embarrassed that Edinburgh Airport, the airport for Scotland's capital, was operating at such a poor level for customer experience.  To add to the embarrassment, we boarded the tram for the 3 minute journey to the Livingston Park and Ride, this ticket was £15.  Coupled with being charged to use a luggage trolley! How can airport bosses justify this blatant greed?!  £15 for a 3 minute journey when a tram in Poland cost two of us £1.20 to travel for up to 20 minutes.  Edinburgh airport is the only option for us to have a decent choice of flights and destinations, Aberdeen airport is closest to us yet Edinburgh offers us choice.  Edinburgh airport has always been a poor experience when travelling through, though the place just feels as though it is becoming worse on each experience.  Edinburgh Airport is by far an embarrassment...

I flew to Scotland this past week from London and then had a flight to Paris the next day. When I arrived we were a little early to then expected so I decided to go through the security checkpoint as earlier as possible. In the London airport I didn’t know that a had to have a bag for all my liquids. So I was prepared to do it again. I was traveling with my family and we were all together and we were the first in line and that’s when the lady told us to put all the liquids in a bag and I still had my stuff in the London bag but I put it in another so it wouldn’t be so full and the lady in front starts telling us repeatedly that we needed to put all the liquids in one bag. I was able to fit everything and then I went through the whole security and I went to get all the bags for my group my grandma had gone first with my dad and my grandma was organizing her stuff since they were looking through her stuff because she had forget some liquids she forget to put in the bag. So keep in mind that my grandma had a really big bag with lot of stuff and the security person was opening everything to make sure he got out every single liquid. So while she was doing that I went to where my bag was since they needed to check it because I forget to put in a perfume in the bag. When I was there the guy was understanding that not everything could fit in the bag but he told me it was ok. He checked it an everything was good and I start reorganizing my bag to put in all the stuff that he took out. I go and talk to my dad and the same lady that was rude to us in the beginning threw away his shampoo because it didn’t fit in the bag at first she was going to throw away his medicine but my dad later explained that he needed it so she threw away something else. After I was done talking to him I got really upset because I went to check with my grandma to see if she had finished organizing her stuff when she tells me that they guy going through her bag had finished and was moving on to someone else and that he moves all her stuff to the floor to make space my grandma and was on the floor picking up everything. These people need to try to be a little nicer and help around and not be so mean. By the way they had a iPad to ask about your experience and surprisingly one was broken and the other one didn’t...