Originally Posted by
willy wombat
Traveling through Gatwick this evening. You’d have thought that, given the misery that the industry has been through that the airport would be pulling out the stops so that now that people are flying again it would be a pleasant experience. So why were there massive queues at security with the x-ray machines repeatedly stopping for several minutes? When we eventually got through I heard one passenger comment “Gatwick’s back to its crappy self”. Difficult to sympathise with airport management complaining about the inconvenience to passengers of the likes of passenger locator forms when they are failing to effectively manage the things they can control.
Unfortunately the old managers with the old mindset are still there, don't know any different. Queues for security are a typical example. Someone on high sets a very loose target that "security queue time should not exceed 20 minutes". This gets interpreted as, providing that it doesn't exceed the 20 minutes, you have Done Your Job. If it's down to 10 minutes you can send a team off for an extra tea break. Builds up again, well, we'll get them back to keep in the limit. This is even before all sorts of gaming the statistics, to show you are within the target. Thoughts of "let's make it a pleasant experience" aren't in the targets set or measured at all.