Travel Throwback: Airport Adventures

For most of us, travel means. airports. You can't avoid them, but can you learn to love them?

Airports are adding all types of rooms, including tiny hotel rooms for travellers who want to sleep a few hours, massive rooms where premium passengers can lounge in luxury and even prison cells. 

I came across the latter recently on a tour of Zurich Airport. Our minivan passed a large grey building with small square windows on the runway perimeter. A new hotel, 1 wondered. "No, our guide explained candidly. "It's a prison for those arriving who are not legal in Switzerland."

Living in an airport beats being in prison, Mehran Karimi Nasseri should know. The Iranian refugee lived in the departure lounge of Terminal One. Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, for 18 years until 2006, after flying in without documents and being declared stateless. His story was the inspiration behind two movies: Tombés du Ciel in 1993 and Steven Spielberg's The Terminal in 2004 No easy way to get famous.

Airports come in all shapes and sizes. At Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, India, two years ago, an official at the check-in counter wrote out my boarding pass in longhand. using a fountain pen. It's hard to find that level of service anymore- and just as well, or we might be queuing for a very long time.

Security screening at Sydney Airport (supplied)

Airports are big business and their facilities are constantly improving, but for most of us they remain places we visit only in order to get somewhere else. I contemplated this recently while passing through Terminal 3 at Heathrow on my way back to Australia. Terminal 3 processes 15.5 million passengers a year and most of them were standing in my queue, wearing picturesque national dress. During the painful eternity it took to pass through security. I had the solace of knowing that I had a bottle of special, high-quality red wine in my hand luggage. I planned to take it back to Australia, or, if in-flight service was slow, sample it on the flight.

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"Have you any liquids in your baggage?" the security man asked sternly. "Just a bottle of wine," I replied. That was it. The wine was confiscated and I never saw It again. It's possibly sitting forlornly in some back-of-the-terminal limbo, surrounded by mountains of impounded nail scissors.

Airports are good at selling a captive audience duty free rum and souvenir ties. Terminal shops once thought that travellers desperately require cuddly toys, T-shirts, name-brand apparel, lingerie, beachwear, designer fashion, jewellery, upmarket pens, travel luggage, books and newspapers. Not to mention, liquor, liquor and more liquor. Around the world, passenger terminals are being reconfigured to drive travellers through duty-free liquor outlets, where salespeople stand ready.

Istanbul Airport: Where a Whopper meal
will cost you almost AU$40.

Have you noticed that airports continually spruik the cheapness of their duty-free goods, while at the same time charging you sky-high prices for virtually everything else? Travellers pay double the standard rate for a gin and tonic at an airport bar and accept it, because we just seem to expect that at an airport. The no-liquids rule means you can't take liquids through security, and mineral water to take on board your flight can cost $5.80 a bottle. You'll increasingly find bottles of it clustered around the airside newsagents to tempt thirsty travellers.

Fortunately, airports are getting better and are slowly realising that their customers want the same sort of goods and services they buy outside. Travellers may be looking for a replacement shoelace rather than an Ermenegildo Zegna cravat. They may want to shop for the kind of things they buy in a shopping mall or department store and at similar prices. They may also want to consume a few public-bar-priced beers or wines at an airport pub, along the lines of those run in British airports by the brilliant Wetherspoon's chain.

It seems they are slowly catching on to these needs and wants. On long-haul flights, somewhere to sleep for a few hours is always welcome. London's Gatwick Airport (busiest single-runway airport in the world) has just introduced Yotel, developed by a sushi restaurant chain and based on the Japanese 'capsule hotel model. Yotel rooms are tiny (seven square metres) and cost just AUD$59 for four hours or double that for a night, with free TV and WiFi internet access. At the moment there is the business-class Yotel cabin and an economy-class version (even cheaper) is on the drawing board. One is also due to open at Heathrow Airport shortly.

Singapore's Changi Airport knows how to please passengers and it consistently tops the international airport list in polls by travellers. It supplies free internet access plus massage and shower facilities and it seems to score very well on that front. As a traveller, you don't have to be a lounge lizard to love lounging around. Airlines lay these on thick for business and first-class travellers, while economy travellers languish. This year's Skytrax Best First Class Lounge Award went to Thai Airways' new Royal First Lounge at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport. Qantas has joined the trend and has opened new First Lounges in Sydney and Melbourne, complete with restaurant and chair-side dining, menus by Neil Perry, showers and spa treatment rooms.

For many passengers, the best kind of lounge may well be along the lines of the Plaza Premium Lounges now open in airports ranging from Vancouver to Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore. These offer top, luxury facilities -but you don't have to fly business or first class to enter. You just pay an entry fee. The concept is so simple, it's brilliant!

The writer, Peter Needham, enjoying a
Coopers Ale on tap at Adelaide Airport

Originally published in Vacations & Travel Magazine October 2007