anothertyke: Yes, you are totally correct. Small airports offer a certain convenience for their passengers. In fact when it comes to convenience, smaller is better and possibly with a few exceptions, big airports are a pain in the bum. Try LHR - my record taxiing there is 50 minutes. The walk to the reclaim can take the same amount of time. Then how do you escape? Slowly and cheaply or a little quicker and get ripped off?
But in too many ways, LBA is like every other British airport. They are not properly managed. This can be seen by chronic under-investment in both time and money. There is no excuse for litter, dust balls, stinky loos, stained walls etc. This happens because too many managers have nice warm offices, posh shoes and greedy directors. Anything that generates an instant profit or an immediate saving is implemented instantaneously. Things that require effort or will take weeks, months or years to show a return are placed on the back-burner.
Our airports will become better places only when the people who run them realise that they exist to take people from where they don't want to be to somewhere they want to be. Passengers are not looking for an "experience" or to be "inspired" (I think I'm about to throw up) or an "engagement". People are there to catch a bloody plane. I'll suggest each person responsible for a booking does a Price/Timetable/Convenience trade off and books accordingly. The airport can affect the first and last parts of the equation and can influence the middle one. But unfortunately they think of the passenger as the customer rather than the user. The customer is the airline. It is a slight change of focus but an important one. Focus on this and at the same time make sure you have the infrastructure to support this and you will end up with more flights, better prices and a great airport. But as I have said above, most UK airports are managed by the same type of greedy myopic individuals so nothing will change in the near future and airports will continue to be run in they way they are.
PM
ps. If you you are going to walk five minutes, why not walk to the "Free 30 minute" car park?