Flight Report : BA 964 London Heathrow - Hamburg
4 July 2026
11:10 - 13:50

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Hamburg is a good long weekend getaway from London. It's a short flight just like my quick trips from Hong Kong to Taipei back when I was based in Asia. Their harbour story drew my attention with lots of regeneration and an amazing miniature world. It looks like a very manageable itinerary with some things to see but not too much to overwhelm.

Elizabeth Line frequencies are not that good on a Saturday morning into Heathrow. For a premium service that costs significantly more than the Piccadilly Line, a service every 30 minutes to Terminal 5 is quite sparse.

Instead of waiting so long, I caught the first train into Terminals 2 and 3, dragged my luggage out, and waited for a Heathrow Express train to Terminal 5. That's not exactly a premium experience that fits the price.

I had a good first EES experience in Budapest the previous month and thought whether I should check my bag in or hand carry it to make a quicker exit in Hamburg hoping for a similar experience. At the bag drop kiosk, the system prompted whether I want to check my hand baggage as well, a sign the flight would be pretty full, so I should board with as little as possible today.

Security didn't take long and Heathrow overall does a good job keeping this part of the airport experience quick and efficient. Exiting air-side, the gate number wasn't available yet but I had expected the narrowbodies would depart from the A-gates anyway. After grabbing a quick bite, my suspicion was validated. The gate is just a short walk away.

Boarding started quite early - over half an hour before departure, a good sign we would leave on time today.

Next door, there was an interesting livery Iberia plane.

We pushed back 2 minutes behind schedule. I noticed the tug seems to work autonomously but there was a staff to monitor it. Perhaps as the technology matures, even that headcount will go. Then it was a long 20 minute taxi, passing by many different types of birds, to take off towards the west. The flight time is a short 70 minutes to a far cooler and grey Hamburg.

We lifted off at 11:32am and after an initial bout of good visibility, we soon were above the clouds and there wasn't much to see anymore.

With not much of a view outside amidst the clouds, I turned my attention to the paid menu.

43 minutes after leaving Heathrow, we started our descent into a grey and wet Hamburg.

We landed at 1:42pm for an on-time arrival. Hamburg has a good variety of airlines, something I didn't expect. It's not a sea of Lufthansa here.

While the flight experience was fine - it's a short flight after all, the worst is yet to come on the ground. Being confident things will go well in smaller airports after a relatively painless experience in Budapest last month, I was surprised there was a huge crowd for immigration. Welcome to EES.

There were staff trying to direct people entering the lines, but how the lines were set up were confusing to start. We were sent in between 2 ropes down the central part of the corridor, which snakes around a few times to the All Passports counters. Europeans would use the kiosks to the right.

But some people were filtering through to the left of the rope where there are some kiosks that nobody was using, and staff weren't instructing us to use. That side corridor led to 2 immigration counters which seemed to keep the line moving. For us in the central lane, we were apparently being processed by 2 different counters and things barely moved. To our right, I saw some families with children also lined up for another set of 2 counters.

So there are 6 counters to process non-EU passengers but through 3 separate lines. There were no staff at the front of the line to redistribute accordingly as processing times differed drastically between counters.

It was quite frustrating to inch our way through. All this took well over an hour and even at the counter, it was a slow process of fingerprinting, taking a photo, and waiting for the officer to click through the system. The strange part was he stamped my passport after all this. Is this a new hybrid EES?

So my entry experience into Hamburg today was an epic fail.