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[ibasiram]

Hello!

I remember reading posts a few years ago on this forum saying that Sheremetyevo was an awful nightmare! There, I read of passport control queues lasting hours in arrivals, and also the doubt as to whether or not there was a shuttle bus linking the two terminals, and their frequency, or lack of it..

i'm arriving in Sheremetyevo 2 in a few weeks at about 8pm (moscow time of course) and my connecting flight is from Sheremetyevo 1, two and a half hours later. i'm wondering, with hours of passport control queues, and waiting for the apparently infrequent shuttle bus, is there enough time to get to the other terminal?

hopefully, SVO's a little nicer these days
I

[expatella_girl]

I dunno about the shuttlebus, but passport control is v_e_r_y s_l_o_w. Two and a half hours is going to be a close shave.

I have 2 pieces of advice for you after spending all day at Sherry last month waiting for someone to creep through the line:

1) There are multiple passport document check lines. Choose the line that has NO Middle Easterners, Pakistanis, or dark people in it. The Russians really work these people over and you're going to stand there behind them waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting......
2) AVOID the line closest to the wall where the little special �mmigration inspection office is. This is where they take all the suspicious Middle Easterners and when they finally decide to release them for the final passport document check they stick them in the FRONT of the closest line, the one right next to the office. So progress is very slow because they will keep inserting these people in front of you out of turn.

Good luck.

[steven_gerrard]

They have recently redone the passport control area so things go a lot more smoothly now- the last few times I've been through, the queue has been ten minutes max, which is an improvement on the hour+ I have had to wait before. Main problem still seems to be people who don't know how to queue (usually Russians who for whatever reason have foreign passports) and who frequently just walk to the front.

Overall though, it's still a horrible airport and an embarrassment to a capital city. It has the worst transport links of any airport I have ever been to anywhere in the world and although it has got a bit cleaner of late, it is generally rather filthy.

[ibasiram]

Hi again,
Thanks to Expatella_girl and Steven_Gerrard for their comments about Sheremetyevo. It's great to see that the passport control waiting seems to have decreased a lot.

It seems like you have to collect your baggage in Moscow and check in it all over again in terminal one for the second leg of the flight and as well as that, I have recently read on a website that you should allow about 4 hours between your connecting flights.

As I am allowing only 2 and a half hours, do you think it is pretty easy to get on a later flight out of Moscow if I miss my flight?

Cheers
I