I can now add “Ethiopia” to my list of “places I have technically been to because I transferred flights there”. This list also includes Latvia, Colombia and the United States of America. We had two transfers in Addis Ababa, so we got to experience Bole International Airport twice. And you, lucky reader, can vicariously enjoy the experience through my review.

Bole International Airport is big and relatively new – maybe twenty years old in the main – with modern architecture, colourful patterns everywhere and interesting sculptures to look at, but it’s already creaking at the seams with the number of people using it. They’re building a new, even bigger airport a few miles away outside the city. The reason it’s busy is Ethiopian Airlines.

Ethiopian Airlines is Africa’s biggest airline, and Addis Ababa is its hub, so if you are flying with them you will transfer between flights at Bole. Everyone at Bole International Airport is transferring between flights. Transfers are what this airport does. When you get off your plane, nobody follows the signs to “arrivals”. Everyone is going for “transfers”.

You are strongly encouraged not to do this. The airport is owned by Ethiopian Airlines, and the airline is owned by the Ethiopian Government, and the government wants tourist revenue, so on your flight and during your stay at the airport you will be bombarded by adverts for all the amazing things you can see and do if you convert your transfer into an overnight layover in Addis Ababa. You get the feeling, at times, that you’re inside an Ethiopian propaganda machine and not an airport at all.

We visited at Ethiopian New Year, which is why there were new year banners everywhere. Ethiopia has its own flavour of Christianity, its own Bible with several extra books, and its own ideas about when exactly Jesus was born, which is why this September is new year 2019.

In general this was a nice-looking airport where nothing worked quite as well as it should. If you wanted to see when your flight departed, the departure boards were made up of four screens, but all four showed the same list. After a while they changed to flip through two or three pages of flights, and all four would change at the same time, so even though there was room for all the flights to be shown all the time, crowds of people had to stand around waiting for them to flip over and show their flight four times simultaneously.

Both times we visited, we changed flights in the middle of the night, and did not appreciate the airport’s attempts to confuse us into thinking we were somewhere else.

Seating was about average, with the usual situation where the gate didn’t have quite enough places for a plane load of people to sit. The chairs were unpadded and basic but did the job. I would describe it as bang average and award Bole 5/10 for seating.

Overall this airport did the job for a flight transfer but was nothing special, and while I don’t leave it with unhappy memories, I would have found my time here considerably more pleasant if it had been a little more organised and a little bit less pushy about Ethiopian tourism. Totalling up my scorecard, Bole International Airport has scored 14/20 on the Marshall Airport Convenience Classification System.