Doha International Airport

Arriving At Doha Airport
When we arrived at Doha airport, we were taken by a shuttle bus to the main airport building. As you enter the airport, you will notice that there are two directions you can take which are well signposted. One path takes you to the main part of Doha airport and the second route takes you to any other connecting fights.

Facilities
There is a small food court in the departure lounge at Doha airport. Here you can choose from roll, sandwiches etc to the normal fast food such as burgers and chips. There is also a little shop which sells ice cream and drinks. The prices were very reasonable and no where near as expensive as we expected it to be. There was also a coffee shop.

There are lots of toilet facilities including disabled toilets and mother and baby changing rooms.

There are prayer rooms located in pretty much all areas of the airport.

There are several sections to the departure area. There are rows of seats which are pretty standard in every airport but there were also smaller lounges which had been sectioned off by a glass screen. Inside these lounges were chairs which fully reclined and the rooms are darkened to enable to people to have a sleep if you have to wait a while for your connecting flight. I thought this was a really nice idea but we were too worried about falling asleep and not being able to keen an eye on the luggage to take advantage of this lounge. I found that there was certainly ample seating at Doha airport and the seats were fairly soft and comfortable.

The duty free shop is a fairly large size and sells all the usual items such as cigarettes, perfumes and alcohol. We bought items here and found that we queued for ages and the shop was really busy. We were at the airport at around 3am so we were not expecting it to be so busy.
There is also an electronic duty free area where you can look at mobile phones, camera and video cameras.

There are several smoking rooms at Doha airport and you are only allowed to smoke inside one of these. As you can imagine, they are pretty full, pretty smoky and not very well ventilated.

Luggage
When we checked onto our outbound flight from Gatwick, we were told by the check in girl that we would not need to collect our luggage at Doha airport as it would be flown directly to Bangkok and we had to pick it up there. This was actually a really useful idea because this meant that we could walk around Doha airport without having to drag all our luggage with us. Needless to say our luggage arrive safely at the other end.

Overall
Overall I enjoyed my experience of travelling through Doha airport. Although the airport was busy, I felt that the airport was large enough and modern enough to cope with all the passengers. I really liked the relaxed lounge and felt that more airports should provide these. There were plenty of information boards all around the airport so you are easily able to check for any flight information and there are also information desks if you have any other queries. Check it was efficient and both our flights left on time.