In order to grow Manchester Airport needs to drastically improve its customer experience. I flew from Manchester Terminal 1 on 14th June and after being dropped off by the car park bus proceeded to the lifts to get to check-in. Only one of the 3 lifts were working with a queue of over 100 people waiting to use the single working lift.
We eventually got to check-in via the arrivals area and up to the "tube" linking the station to the airport.
After check-in we proceeded through security and into the duty-free area and then the passenger lounge before being shepherded into a bussing lounge to await transport to the aircraft on a remote stand. Since checking-in we had been at the airport 90 minutes and not seen daylight!!! The flight was then delayed as the ground handler had failed to clean the aircraft from the night before! This delayed us a for 45 minutes.
On arrival back at Manchester on 22nd June, the aircraft was parked on an air-bridge on Terminal 1. We walked up the air-bridge along a filthy discoloured carpet which was held down by black masking tape. On exiting the air-bridge we weant down stairs across a corridor and up some more stairs. We proceeded along the corridor were the carpet was patched up by black masking tape, was threadbare in places, and even torn which could have caused people to trip and fall.
At the end of the corridor there were two flights of stairs taking us over the departure area. The escalator and the lift here were not working and some passengers had walking difficulties. After crossing over the departures there were two flights of stairs down to the passport area, again the escalator and lift were out of order. This really is not acceptable for a so-called major airport and it is not the first time I have had a bad experience at Manchester.
Perhaps the powers that be at Manchester should visit some of the Far East airports I had just travelled through or even visit Liverpool Airport, only 30 miles away, which has a nice light terminal with working escalators, lifts and nice carpets!