Who knows if the ‘planned’ move from Luton to Stansted is truth, fiction or renewed skirmishing between Easy and the airport management (and if they do move will we see the introduction of a BAA Fat Cat Tax to replace the ridiculous surcharge that they still lay at the doors of Barclays bank)?
But the unnamed source does have a point. The new bits of Luton (basically where you can spend money) show up how shoddy the old undeveloped parts of the airport (basically the places where you can’t spend money) actually are. A branch of Boots and Books Etc is nice, but the departure lounge seating area is cramped and over crowded.
Luton must have a microclimate all of its own – it always seems a few degrees colder than the rest of the south east – which makes the trudge across the tarmac and having to queue in the wet and the cold to get into the arrivals hall a less than pleasant experience. I would not like to be in the tiny baggage reclaim hall on an above average busy day.
As for the car-parking, if they are going to charge more than Gatwick or Stansted they should at least try and match the quality of their product.
Luton does have good points, as another poster said; the train connections are better than Stansted. Yes, Luton council could have done better when they run the place. But at the moment it seems to be neither one thing or the other – not quite a basic secondary airport of the sort favoured by Ryan Air, but at the same time its not the glitzy international gateway it seems to have pretensions to want to be