Air Travel Alert!

Do airports really have to be so awful?

Why is modern air travel such an ordeal? Moreover, is it a requirement or merely a coincidence, that airports are staffed by some of the most officious and rudest people on the planet?

As ever the sheer awfulness of the airport experience can be ameliorated by paying a great deal of money to avoid the worst. Traveling business or first class can get you away from the rabble and into lounges serving drinks and food. It can also help alleviate some of the queues, which in airports are for more or less everything.

It’s no good bellyaching about this because life is not fair and folks with money can pay their way into a more comfortable traveling experience. But, if schadenfreude is your thing, bear in mind that such is the degraded state of many airports, that even those paying big bucks can get caught up in the boarding gate malaise for the simple reason that the chaos is too overwhelming and, frankly, far too many people running airports don’t give a damn.

They certainly don’t give a damn for the great majority of passengers traveling in cattle class, more inaccurately described as economy, a word that exudes all the glamour of a visit to the murky London Underground at rush hour.

It is not as if economy passengers are not paying, paying a great deal in fact, for using airports. Usually the unsuspecting punters are unaware quite how much they pay because the airport passenger duty charge is incorporated into the ticket price and that’s on top of the landing fees levied on the airlines themselves.

In Britain these duties – essentially a service fee – range from £7 for an economy class domestic flight to a mouthwatering £224 for the long distance standard rate. These fees are due to rise next year.

Then passengers are fleeced not just for parking but for being dropped off at the terminal. Once inside everything you might want to buy (aside from duty free) is not just a little bit more expensive than prices outside the airport but can be double. In large part this is because airport operators charge staggeringly high rents to retailers and food outlets.

In return for paying top dollar passengers can expect long waiting times for more or less everything. The biggest bottlenecks occur during security checks but can be equally horrendous on arrival as immigration desks are rarely filled with staff so, guess what? Fewer desk process fewer people. The alternative of passport checking machines is good in theory but they often malfunction.

Airport owners claim that this excruciating inconvenience is beyond their control. They say that security requirements are imposed upon them and that immigration procedures are entirely out of their hands. This is both true and misleading.

The government makes the regulations, some of them seriously daft. A case in point is the 100ml restriction on bringing liquids into the airport’s secure area. This followed a 2006 Al Qaeda attempt to blow up a plane using liquid explosives contained in bottles. Ever since, with only slight evidence of a terrorist deterrent, the search for liquids has caused queues to multiply and then multiply again. Only now, some two decades later, are airports installing electronic scanners that can examine liquids. This is despite the availability of technology which can the job but a combination of high cost and government reluctance to change the regulations has meant that not just liquids but regulations on shoe removal etc. etc. make security check queues an absolute nightmare, even for the fine folk in business class.

Security is a real issue but no excuse for not adopting technological solutions to make it work better.

None of this explains why immigration officials seem to specialize in being unpleasant. There are exceptions but they are rare even in countries like Thailand where polite service is almost universal but immigration officers show they just as good as their counterparts in nations where the goose-step prevails.

Such are the low expectations of treatment by immigration officials that I entirely misheard a warm greeting to Malta by an officer at Valletta airport. I assumed I had somehow done something wrong so asked what it was. He smiled and said ‘I am welcoming you to Malta’. I scuttled away shaking in disbelief.

To be fair unpleasantness is not confined to the immigration department. Check-in staff can frequently be on the wrong side of brusque. The crowded F&B outlets appear to have unearthed a cadre of staff who can shout at customers and reprimand them for their many transgressions.

Of course it’s always possible that you don’t want to pay through the nose for anything airports have to offer. But because waiting times are long you might want to sit down; it’s not impossible but darn difficult to find a seat and its best to temper any expectation of sitting together with your travelling companions.

Some airports are way better than others, notably in the Gulf and East Asia, but this is far from the cases in places regarded as key travel hubs, that’s more or less everywhere in the USA, definitely in Britain and in most parts of Europe.

I am beginning to wonder whether this amounts to a cunning save the earth plan to dissuade people from travelling by air.