Why do so many people hate US airports? (2015)
bbc.com
bbc.com
- Empower airport personnel to care about the airport in the same way we do national monuments, etc. Changi, etc., want to wow foreign visitors. We should have the same mindset.
- Completely streamline and eliminate to maximum feasible extent the omnipresent "security announcements". The infuriatingly grating and condescending messages that begin with "The Transportation Security Administration..." at airports like DCA are somewhere between rage-inducing and dehumanizing.
- Patrick Smith (quoted in the article) has long campaigned against the incredibly loud airport TVs blaring CNN or somesuch, and fortunately, some airports seem to be listening. The rest should as well.
- Seats whose primary purpose is to prevent anyone sleeping there also have the side effect of being quite uncomfortable. Is the sleeping people issue such a big deal that all passengers who want to sit have to pay the price?
There has to be a ton of low-hanging fruit like this which is probably why the U.S. airport experience is so detested - it's a sign of so much negligence that such relatively easy and inexpensive measures are not taken.
I don't understand this. Post 9/11, anyone who enters the terminal is either a paying customer with an upcoming flight or staff. It's not like a train station where you need to worry about the homeless hanging around.
Why can't you just walk a few gates down to one with an open seat?
But yes, they'd have to be pretty cheap, but make them cheap enough and even the most comfortable terminal chairs will be less preferable to a couple of bucks for an hours sleep on a mediocre bunk.
> "Patrick Smith of Ask the Pilot blog, says...: 'Our security protocols are needlessly tedious, and the connection process for passengers arriving from overseas is horrendously time-consuming. All passengers arriving from other countries are required to clear immigration, re-check their bags, and undergo the Transport Security Administration rigmarole, even if they're merely in transit to a third country.'
Sixty-seven percent of people who fly out of America arrive at a better airport, the Economist estimated last year, after delving into data on more than a million flights."
But yeah, the dingy and cramped gate areas are just the final insult added to the TSA's already-ruined travel experience.
In Australia, the wait times seem like they're generally due to low staffing at peak times rather than process or infrastructure.
I've rarely waited longer than 5 minutes to clear security at any airport in Australia, the queues flow quickly and efficiently- cf. my recent experiences at LAX, Charlotte Douglas and JFK where I made sure I was turning up 3 hours early for domestic flights, and still came close to missing at JFK despite having a priority line through frequent flier level.
What a joke. The procedures are unnecessary and demeaning.
It looks like they could improve efficiency by just having a longer conveyor for the XR machine! Pathetic.
Was just thinking about longer conveyor belts too. The body scanner is rarely a chokepoint. Seems to be either the guy manning the x-ray machine, or people loading/unloading on the conveyor.
Maybe it was the 7 staff standing around behind the 2 desks processing a full plane of people?
Or maybe the other people whose job it seemed to be to threaten anyone who took their phone out with a $10,000 fine?
Or the yet-more-people walking around in the luggage reclaim section checking something so that then you can queue to have another person check the same thing to choose what other queue you can get into.
I've found US and European immigration much better.
On the other end is YVR, perhaps the best airport in north america.
I suppose you can multiplex seats between adjacent gates by making sure you don't schedule flights at the same time, but I see that not happening. And generally you can't hear the announcements from the adjacent gate.
If you can't have cellular communication when you land... just WTF?! Backwards country.
You'll want to find the nearest AT&T or T-Mobile store as those are the two networks that support semi-standard 3G. Note that they both use unique radio networks so you'll need to check what bands your phone supports and what bands each provider supports in a given area for compatibility. Yes, it really is this stupid here.
If you're in London Heathrow airport, there are vending machines that sell a ready-to-go pre-activated pre-paid all-sizes SIM card from Three, for £20. It gives you 30 days of near-unlimited roaming to 19 countries including in the USA where it uses AT&T and T-Mobile.
The only catch is tethering is not allowed. Oh, and you won't have a local phone number. But if you really want a local phone, your best bet is to pick up a hilariously cheap disposable phone from a retail store.
If you're from the US and you have T-Mobile you get free roaming almost everywhere...at 2G. I ended up buying a datapass which gives you LTE if possible at 50 usd...for 500 MB for two weeks. I ended up using it all, but hey, even when that was gone, I could still connect albeit slowly.
Last week, I used it across London, Singapore, and Seoul. It was a god-send without having to buy a new SIM...yes, it used my old number, from what I understand.
EDIT: The free 2G is real...no extra fees. It's free data (out of your usual plan) and texts, but I think it's a couple of cents for calls, as if I give a shit about that.
User pays.
And as an added bonus you can take a train right to downtown in 22 minutes
The users of airports are the airlines, not passengers.
Airports that charge "improvement fees" are double-dipping; they already charge a per-passenger fee as part of the aircraft handling fees.
And don't even get me started on the TSA and their insistence on screaming at me to take my phone out of my pocket (as if there are people in the damned elite lane that somehow don't know this already).
This is one where your mileage may vary, but my most unfriendly experiences have been in Canada. Both Toronto and Vancouver. Other countries haven't been spectacular, mostly just sleepy immigration workers. I'd say that the folks in Germany (FRA) were the most cheerful and friendly so far.
The one curious exception has been the UK, where I've had a solid run of miserable sods who don't seem to appreciate that anyone would want to visit their country.
Now that I'm a Nexus Pass holder (US/CAN border) and eligible for TSA pre-check it's not such a big deal but damn US airports are way overdone.
They all suck. At least US airports don't charge you for water, which you can get at a water fountain.
I always used to enjoy sucking down some good, cool water in PDX after a long flight which likely involved the purchase of outrageously priced bottled water at some point in a European airport.
I'm a biker/buser though, so I may be biased, if my flippant commment doesn't demostrate that already.
They have nothing to compete with (no hyperloop yet) so there is not much of driver to improve.
Other (Asian) airports are newers as article mentions, they are often used as showcase piece for national pride. It is not just that one locality building it, it is the whole country.
Also out of some European airports, I liked Vienna because it is nice and small. Amsterdam is not too bad. I found Paris CGD and Frankfurt a big dirty mess, not a lot different than say JFK or Dulles (IAD).
There's certainly an ethical debate about paying the government for better service but from a pragmatic standpoint, I can't recommend it enough.
What's far more offensive to me is that you have to supply your biometric information, submit yourself to an examination by a government agent in a review center, and submit to being photographed and fingerprinted like you are a criminal. In a free society citizens should be able to travel freely with being extorted, harassed, or otherwise molested by the government.
Sometimes the lines end up being just as long, which is frustrating.
At $10/year (for the amount I fly per year, it works out to roughly 25 cents per leg of travel), I can't really think of anything more cost efficient to save that much time, stress, etc.
(This probably involves giving up less privacy than creating a Facebook or Google account, of course.)
And even better experience is Keflavik in Iceland (only separated from Ireland by one sea), where the only exposure you have to immigration/customs is the passport office.
Of course in both cases if you are a US citizen or travelling to the US you have extra checks to go through. Poor bastards.
But the TSA us the reason people hate the USA, not the crumbling crappy infrastructure.
I was sure you were gonna say one letter.
For transitioning, MUC is way better (smaller) than FRA.
On return, I find the hoops necessary at foreign airports imposed on US bound flights silly (extra questions, sometimes extra security, etc).
That said, with Global Entry, hitting the kiosk, handing over a slip and skipping a process that could be near 90min is gold.
Most of my travel is to SFO, which is great by US standards but I've also been through Boston, Miami & Austin in the last year and the departure zones are pretty awful.
The down side is that aircraft and airports are crowded (better utilization) and there's far more security (leaving aside TSA issues there's no obvious alternative to keep terrorists off flights).
Maybe the answer is just to adjust our expectations a bit. If I get to my destination in one piece and roughly on time the airport does not make a lot of difference. It's not as if most of us live there.
I'd buy that. Well, except for the fact that some light rain will cause 4 delays on all flight. But apart from that, it's a pretty good airport.
Small town airports tend to be great, but expensive to fly to/from. No lines, very clean, almost no walking, plenty of seating, nice staff, pretty nice interior, cheap parking. Even if the airport was old, the lack of bullshit is great.
http://www.sleepinginairports.net/2015/best-airports-world.h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_International_Airpor...
And I was right in the sense that they don't make you take your shoes off or put you through the naked photo machine. However, the inconspicuous bag inspector literally disassembled my entire backpack, dumped everything out on the table in the most disorganized fashion possible, then literally walked away without saying a word leaving me 10 minutes to repack everything. That and they took away my post-security water on the jetway boarding the plane (apparently they only do this on US-bound flights though).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_Airport#Coll...
And they also stole a huge bag of my stuff there, years ago.