This is probably years late but just went through Manchester Terminal 1 last week and it's changed so much since I was there last - about 4 years ago.
What struck me how quite it seemed. I was there from about 1pm - 3pm on Thursday and maybe it was a quite time but even looking at the departure board there didn't seem to be too many flights for the rest of the day. All the food/drink facilities seemed pretty empty with almost more staff than customers. I know in pax terms it is about the same as Dublin which seemed much busier.
I remember going to Manchester a few times as a kid and always remember the roof of the terminal building which was pretty striking. Now there is virtually nothing on departure level before going through to the gates and I couldn't understand where all the space had been changed until going through to the massive security area and then the massive duty free area. Does it make sense to lose all the landside facilities and put everything airside? It might seem strange but I thought the airport was missing something without the landside terminal I remember.
I have never been in an airport where you have to virtually go through a maze to get to the gates through the biggest duty free shop I have ever seen and I thought I was going through the wrong way - again there didn't seem to be many customers there buying anything. On the plus side there were many good choices for food/drink in the departures area airside.
Two complaints I have though are about the gates and flight announcements. We were going from gate 7 and when I got down there it was just stand around until the flights were called - no seats at all. This doesn't seem a good way of giving customers a good experience and then it was weird to go to a gate on one side of the concourse and cross under to board from the other side - are all the gates like that in Manchester? No seats and criss cross the pier to board?
Also about 25 minutes before departure a final call announcement was made. With the crowd of people standing around a few approached the gate quickly enough trying to board, probably thinking the others were waiting for a different flight, and were met with a daggers look and a scowl from the ground crew and were told 'wait like everybody else'. When they said about the announcement she barked at them 'it's automated'. She might know that from working there every day but pax wouldn't know that. Again very poor customer service but why are there automated announcements telling pax to do something that they can't do?
Also I only found out later that they have a smoking area in the departures area but I didn't see any signs for it in the terminal. That's a great facility to have for those of us that smoke but I didn't even know they had one.
Just wondering what people who use the airport regularly think about these things?
While I was there I got to see an A380 for the first time and saw the Emirates machine take off in the cloud and rain so that was a first for me.