The railway station underneath Berlin Brandenburg Airport was finished on time. For the next nine years, empty trains rolled through it several times a day so the tunnel would not grow mold, past platforms nobody was allowed to stand on, beneath a terminal nobody was allowed to enter.
That is BER in one image. The airport finally opened on October 31, 2020, sits in Schönefeld just across the state line in Brandenburg, and now moves around 26 million passengers a year. It is the only commercial airport Berlin has, which makes the practical questions easy: there is no wrong airport to pick, only the wrong terminal.
Getting There and Away
By Train
The train station sits directly under Terminal 1 and runs around the clock. Take the escalator down and you are on the platform, which is a rarer arrangement than it sounds. The fast option from there is the FEX, the airport express. Since December 2025 it runs over the rebuilt Dresdner Bahn line and reaches Berlin Hauptbahnhof in about 23 minutes, every fifteen minutes, stopping only at Südkreuz and Potsdamer Platz. Before that it took the long way around the north of the city and needed nearly forty minutes, which is the number plenty of guidebooks still print.
The S-Bahn lines S9 and S45 are slower but stop far more often, so check those first if your hotel sits in the east or southeast. Several regional lines run too, and no ICE stops here at all.
One thing will catch you out: the airport lies in fare zone C, and a standard Berlin AB ticket does not cover it. You need ABC, every train, every time, both directions. Buy it from the machines at the station and validate it before boarding.
By Bus
Local buses connect BER with the surrounding Brandenburg communities, which is useful if you live out there. Heading downtown, the train beats them on every measure. I would not spend a minute looking for the stop.
By Taxi and Car
A taxi into central Berlin takes 35 to 45 minutes and costs many times the train fare. The ranks are in front of Terminal 1; Terminal 2 has none of its own. Book parking online rather than at the barrier, where rates are considerably higher.
Terminals and How Not to Get Lost
Terminal 1 is the main building and handles most flights. Terminal 2 is the smaller one right next door, used mainly by low-cost carriers, reachable on foot in a few minutes. Check-in, security, and baggage are separate in each, so the terminal on your booking is the one you want.
Terminal 5 is the trap.
It is the old Schönefeld building, renovated, renamed, and then mothballed at the end of 2022 without ever really being used. Travel sites still tell you Ryanair departs from T5 and that a shuttle runs between terminals. Neither is true anymore.
While You Wait
I will be honest with you: BER is not an airport where you want to arrive early for the pleasure of it. Clean, quiet, well signed, and about as warm as a well-run hospital. Nothing here comes close to what Munich managed with its own brewery.
Two things are worth your attention anyway. Over the check-in hall in Terminal 1 floats a huge red carpet of woven metal mesh, hung under a ceiling 32 m (105 ft) up. It is called THE Magic Carpet, and the artist behind it is Pae White from California, which I find quietly funny for the most photographed object in Berlin’s airport. The other is the visitor terrace upstairs, looking straight out over the aprons and runways: free, open to anyone, and the best place in the building to park a restless seven-year-old.
Things to Know
BER has a hard night curfew. Nothing takes off or lands between midnight and 5 a.m., with tight limits either side of that window. This matters more than it sounds: a delayed evening arrival that misses the deadline gets diverted to another airport, and you finish the journey by bus. Worth weighing when the cheapest ticket is the last one out.
Security in Terminal 2 uses CT scanners, so laptops and liquids stay in the bag. Terminal 1 is a mix, so pack as if you will have to unpack. Morning peaks are the ugly ones, and the airport app shows live waiting times per checkpoint. For flight status and anything else that shifts week to week, use the airport’s own English site.
Still deciding which German city to fly into? I have pages on airports across the country and the airlines that serve them.
The Airport That Took Fourteen Years
Ground was broken in September 2006 and the plan was to open in the autumn of 2011. In 2010 that slipped to June 3, 2012. Four weeks before the day, the airport company admitted the smoke extraction system could not be signed off, and called the whole thing off along with the party for 40,000 invited guests.
At the press conference where all this came out, Berlin’s mayor called the construction project a success story, and the room laughed at him. That clip has been on the internet ever since, and it deserves to be.
What followed was six broken opening dates, four airport chiefs, six technical directors, and a fire safety system so unmanageable that the people working on it took to calling it the monster. The final bill came to roughly three times the original estimate. Meanwhile, the red carpet in the check-in hall, commissioned in 2012, hung for eight years above a hall with nobody in it.
We Germans have spent a lot of energy explaining to visitors that things here run on time. Berlin took that reputation, put it in a very expensive building, and left it there for a decade. ;-)
The old airports closed fast once BER was running. Tegel (TXL) sent off its last flight on November 8, 2020, an Air France departure for Paris, and the site is being rebuilt as a research and housing quarter. Schönefeld (SXF) became Terminal 5 and was then quietly switched off.
Before You Go
When you ride that escalator down to the platform, have a look around before the train comes. This is the same station those empty trains rolled through for nine years, keeping the air moving for passengers who were not allowed to exist yet. Now one leaves every quarter hour.