My wife and I went on a week’s holiday in the middle of last month, to Perast in Montenegro. It was lovely; I will be blogging about it another time. This about the travelling bit; or, to be more precise, the travelling from.
As we approached the airport at Tivat for our return flight to Heathrow, there was almost a hint of pride in our taxi driver’s voice as he passed on some information. “People say this is the worst airport in the world,” he said. Our first reaction was along the lines of ‘surely not?’ and/or ‘well, it’s not like we can fly from somewhere else’. I thought of Kalamata Airport in Greece, which wasn’t up to much, or Budapest Airport, where, as you can see from the photo on the home page, the terminal has a distinctly brutalist-look to it, architecturally-speaking. Neither would be making it into any travel feature in any glossy magazine.
But at least Budapest, like Kalamata, did have a small cafe, which was doing trade from before 6 in the morning. The terminal at Tivat had a comparatively swanky duty-free shot but no cafe. (In the interests of accuracy, I should point out that while the airport at Tivat is defiintely on the small side, it does in fact have two terminals.) Therefore, if you didn’t have the coins the vending machine required, that was just too bad. Plus, with two flights soon to be boarding, before ours, there were way too few seats available for sitting down. It was basically standing-room only and zero chance of a coke zero, or even a cup of crappy coffee. There was apparently an executive lounge, which presumably did provide comestibles of some description, but that was only available to passengers of local airlines, and since we were not going to Podgorica or Belgrade, that was not a lot of help.
Montenegro hopes to get financial assistance to improve its national infrastructure when it joins the European Union, which it hopes to do in 2028. But it has been hoping to join for some while (its neighbour, Croatia, is already in the EU) and one senses there are a lot of governmental fingers being kept permanently crossed. The fuselages of the aircraft operated by Air Montenegro bear the words ‘the next EU member’, but one has to figure that is at least as much in hope as in expectation.
But, hey, at least our flight did leave on time. Which, apart from safety, is the main thing.