Originally Posted by
old,not bold
Sadly, the battle was lost decades ago; The shopkeepers took over BAA around 1985, and that's when the rot started. There were those of us who maintained that the function of an airport is to facilitate the transfer of passengers between surface transport and the aircraft door as quickly and expeditiously as we could make it. Clear pathways, as short as possible. We were ridiculed and told to join the modern world. It became a key priority to lengthen the "average dwell time" in the departure area; the target started at 1 hours, but before long was 3 hours. Managers who achieved this were rewarded. Among the many ways to do that was to start to tell passengers, via their airlines, that they should arrive much earlier than they needed to.
As for the "duty-free" con, duty-free shops simply part the terminally gullible from their money. Mark-ups are huge, while so-called comparisons with the mythical "high Street" prices are spurious and misleading. Most of the stuff is not dutiable in the first place but is still marked "duty-free". We are talking about excise duties here, which in airports means duties levied on alcohol and tobacco. And dutiable stuff is not duty-free within the EU. My heart sinks when I see foreign tourists leaving the UK actually buying the rubbish in the belief that they are getting a bargain on a designer label. Especially the Chinese; in many cases they could probably find the garment they just paid £177.50 for being made near where they live for £2.50, plus 50p extra for the label.
The argument that duty-free income reduces airport user charges is entirely false, in BAA certainly, and I suspect everywhere else. What the income does is remove any incentive to operate efficiently, so the running costs remain absurdly high, and of course the owners want to maximise what they steal from the business; you don't do that by reducing charges. The regulator in UK (CAA) is a toothless tiger, in thrall to the industry. Many of those operating costs are associated with the duty-free shopping; the space is not cheap to build and run, and it all has to be maintained. Imagine a simple, clean building; not a shop in sight apart from some cafes and a newsagent. Go through security, board 10 minutes later. Do you know what? It was once like that....OK, no security then, but security isn't the problem. It's all those b****y shops. Dream on.
To pass the time hanging about in the departure lounge because you were told to get there 2 hours too early, it is good entertainment to find outlets selling non-dutiable stuff underneath a sign saying "duty-free" and ask the managers what duties their junk is free of. One of these days I'll do that and record the answers.
Spot on!
As regular SLF through BHX we now plan to arrive at Check In at minus 1.15 - 1.30 max (we always pre-book seats - another nice little Earner) . By the time we've weaved our way through the Security lines (we no longer pay for so called Express), a quick walk along the unavoidable sparkly black path of DF, we can usually see our Gate No flagged upon the board. So we go to Gate and enjoy waiting there whilst our flight is delayed.