Ashgabat International Airport

On our flight from Ashgabat to Frankfurt at around 1 am on May 29 we got our passports checked and our luggage scanned multiple times even before we got to the registration desk, and aditional times after that. It seemed that they had a passport check point in every corridor that connected one zone of the airpot to another. The waiting zone was full of cigarette smoke, as it was allowed to smoke and ventialtion was insufficient, therefore, we went to wait to another hall that served 4 more boarding gates. We almost missed our flight sitting there -- there was no billboard to announce boarding anywhere in view, and they boarded all of the passengers that were in the correct (smoke-filled) waiting hall without making any radio announcements. The Airport does not have a tax-free shop; the only existing shop sells Turkmen carpets, but we did not check if it was open.