Shed, I have nothing but admiration for that (rather long winded!) post. Everything you said speaks perfect sense and is conveyed in a factual but none bitchy way. You've clearly thought through everything you wanted to say prior to posting and reasoned with all the negatives you mention, which is a nice change from the usual bashing that occurs on here.
More often than not, I defend the airport from the relentless bashing. The reason? Because I work for Customer Services and I have to. Basically it's my job. When in uniform I represent MAG and have to take the position of ambassador for the airport. Sometimes, some things that are said become personal. That can't be helped. It's the way we are trained and the way we go about our daily duties. We are the face of Manchester Airport and cannot slag it off in any name, shape or form. At least to the passengers anyway.
Some things that the airport gets slagged off for are unfair. A classic example is poor customer service. Everyone on our team does an amazing job and the same can be said for the handling agents and airlines. The staff work extremely hard in what is a challenging environment, often dealing with difficult customers. To anyone that says the staff at MAN are unfriendly, I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more. It's very easy to judge but you try dealing with the idiots we have to deal with and still stay smiling.
There are many other examples. Travellators for instance constantly get slated on here. Many of you make fair points but the fact of the matter is, more often than not the travellators aren't working because kids have been playing with the emergency stop button. This is not an excuse, just pointing out a fact. The point I am trying to make is, it's very easy to slag off the running of an airport without any knowledge of what exactly happens behind the scenes.
Manchester is not perfect, Shed's post highlights this. It has the potential to be great but is unfortunately let down in certain areas. There are many issues that need to be rectified and often the reason behind these issues is lack of investment by senior management. In my capacity I would never defend Geoff Muirhead or any of his board, as I believe that their greed has been the downfall of the airport over the past few years. However, the airport is not third world as many of you seem to believe. It has a great deal going for it and if it can iron out such problems then I truly believe it will be a top European airport again very soon. The drop in passenger numbers is the golden opportunity to sort things out whilst the terminals are below capacity and prove that we are the best airport in the region.
Things have already been recognised as needing improvement. All three terminals currently resemble construction sites and by next summer new security areas will have been constructed to decrease queuing time. All the seats have been replaced across the terminals recently and by next Spring all toilet units will have been revamped. These may only be small things but as Shed has pointed out, it's numerous small things added together that MAN is doing wrong. There will be dramatic improvements by next summer and hopefully this will continue.
We can all pick faults at anything. I was at LPL last Sunday and the security queue was a good 30 mins long. Added to that you have to pay 50p for a plastic bag for your liquids and no-one was on hand to help out. At Manchester the plastic bags are free and there's staff to assist you before you reach security. I could well go on the Pprune Liverpool forum and start slagging off the airport but I don't. Because overall the experience was good. Just as I believe the overall MAN experience isn't all that bad. I'll hold my hands up and admit there's problems and yes, we need to sort them out asap. But it's not all doom and gloom. Surely?