If you separate the airport proper from the mediocre discount airlines that tend to fly there, you'll find it's really quite good. It is just big enough to have the conveniences you would expect from a real international airport (not like Maastricht where everything is always closed), and just small enough for everything to still be very compact and fast: baggage, for instance, arrives at the belt almost instantly, and the distance from the gate to buses and taxis and parking and such is minimal.
I don't know what the place is like when it gets really busy, or whether it does get really busy. When I was there, the capacity of everything (check in counters, walkways, waiting areas, security lines, concession stands) was more than adequate and the whole experience was quite pleasant. There's a Starbucks, a local coffee chain I forget the name of, an Albert Heijn To Go convenience store (with real fresh baked bread, great fruit juices, and fresh coffee), and a restaurant that I didn't try but that looked decent enough. Also important to note is that there aren't so many concession stores and duty free shops and the like that foot traffic through the airport is impeded, like at Stansted, where the terminal hall has been turned into a perfume-and-liquor shopping mall with some gates off to the side.
There are no jetways (and in fact the entire airport proper is on the ground level) so you may have to walk through the rain for a bit to get to your plane. I suppose it would be nice if they could at least cover those fenced-in walkways on the tarmac with some sort of roof. I think it's reasonable given the size of the airport and the sort of traffic it gets, though. The planes that come here mostly aren't big jumbo jets, but the budget airlines still cram a good number of seats into them; boarding nearly 200 people into an airplane with only one aisle actually goes a lot faster when you board from both entrances, and that's a lot easier to do when you board from the tarmac. And besides, there is no need for extensive precision taxi maneuvers and the like when a plane arrives, so at the cost of passengers having to carry an umbrella, I bet you end up with faster turnaround times.
There is no train station in the airport, like there is at Amsterdam, but short of that everything possible has been done to tie the airport into the transit network. I know foreign transit systems can be intimidating to the most intrepid of travelers, and I may be a bit biased seeing as I grew up in The Netherlands, but I really think it's perfectly feasible for visitors to use. Once you get outside of the major airports and tourist traps, Dutch train stations have announcements and signage mostly in Dutch, but they tend to be filled with friendly Dutch commuters fluent in several languages.
The airport is a train station for ticketing purposes, so you can buy a ticket at a national rail ticketing machine to any station in the country and get right on the bus to the station without having to worry about bus tickets -- or you get a bus ticket from one of several ticket machines located right next to the bus stop and figure out the rest at the train station -- or if you really want to live by "when in Rome" you get an "OV chipkaart" contactless national transit charge card from the ticket machine. I took the express bus (line 400): it was clean and spacious and comfortable, and it took about 20 minutes. There's also a slightly slower variant with a few stops (line 401), and between the two lines the frequency is very high (at least one bus every 10 minutes). read more
