Madrid Airport

I have to say, I am not a big fan of the Madrid Airport. I went to Europe on my one week vacation, flying into Madrid from New York, and then fly home to New York from Nice, France, but transferring in Madrid. Many things went wrong (or not smoothly) at the Madrid airport, leaving quite a bad impression in my mind. First, the airport is HUGE. Really, is there a need for such a big airport? Is there that many people that fly into and out of Madrid everyday? It took us about 30 minutes to walk from our gate when we landed to custom. 30 minutes. What is up with that? That is so much time wasted by walking, talking the escalator and the train. Also, you figure that given the 30 minutes walk we had, and the time it took to go through custom, our luggage would be ready to be picked up once we are at baggage claim. But noooooooooo, let's make people wait for an hour for their bags. I mean, seriously, did they not hire enough people for this? It was not like there were tons of other flights coming in around that time. I just don't understand it.

On our return flight, the flight was delayed, but we had a 4 hour layover. Taken into account of the delay, the layover is cut to about 3 hours. We figure that would be a lot of time, but I was so wrong. First, it took us longer than 30 minutes to go from one terminal to the gates that we are suppose to depart from. Then, we had to wait for quite a long time to go through customs because of the large group of American high school teens that were traveling on the same flight as well going through customs, but the custom officials were especially confused with us since we did not have our tickets from Madrid to New York with us, as we were told by the Iberia representative that we are suppose to pick up our tickets from the terminal that we are departing from, which we can only reach by going through custom. Finally, after reaching the terminals where we can pick up tickets, it took the Iberia agents about another 30 minutes to get 6 tickets ready, I mean, seriously, why is checking in taking such a long time? I have never experienced such a long check in wait at a ticket counter, which is ridiculous. So when it is all said and done, we have about 1 hour left before departure, which didn’t leave us with much time to explore the many shops at the Madrid airport. Also, what is worse is that the flight is full and none of our seats are together, ridiculous. It is just an extremely bad experience overall, probably one of the top 3 bad airport/airline experiences I have ever had.