Chiang Mai Airport: not good

I've been singing the praises of Chiang Mai ever since my arrival here a few days ago. The inexpensive nature of pretty much everything, the parks, the friendliness, etc are all wonderful. However, not everything can be great and this is why we will now focus on a major blemish for this otherwise wonderful city: The airport

I didn't realize it when i was arriving here because I already had a Grab taxi booked and headed straight out the door, ignoring much of what was going on around me. The main problem is this: This airport is nowhere near as big as it needs to be. There are over a million residents in the metropolitan area of Chiang Mai and this is the 2nd most popular tourist destination in all of Thailand, yet their domestic wing only has 11 terminals.

Krabi has 40,000 permanent residents and is really far down the list as far as its rank in popular locations is concerned and Krabi airport has 5 terminals.

The car park has adopted a method of (poorly) dealing with the issue of inadequate parking by having a system where you actually park behind already parked cars and leave your car in neutral so that if someone needs to get out, parking attendants will come and move the cars by pushing it. This makes very little sense to me seeing as how the areas ALL AROUND the airport are vacant land. This might be because it is not allowed to build anything next to an airport, i don't have any idea.

When you arrive at the drop off point, the 3 lanes provided are nowhere near enough for traffic flow and this mean sthat I was actually in traffic on airport grounds longer than I was in the taxi from my hotel, 20km away. The fun doesn't end there though.

Since domestic departures and arrivals are on the same floor, there are security checkpoints at every entrance. This results in massive lines stretching down the quite narrow sidewalks outside. You still have to go through security again before you arrive at your gate. Which will almost certainly result in you sitting on the floor seeing as how a gate that has a waiting area for a plane meant to hold 300 people, has 90 seats.

This didn't affect me much because I am a solo traveler and I just went to the pub because (PRO TIP) there are always available seats in the pub... and they have booze.

I haven't investigated this yet, but I sincerely hope that there are plans of expanding this airport. I suppose the light at the end of the tunnel is that you don't have to walk very far because the place is so small. However, you do have to deal with the fact that you are almost certainly going to be bumping into someone at all times.

Unless of course you go to the pub... Always go to the pub :)