Rate Your Airport Queueing Experience (UK)

[fyrefli]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/sep/17/travelnews.theairlineindustry

Passengers stuck in airport queues can now do something a little more productive with their time than just grumbling to their neighbour. A new website aims to track the amount of time passengers spend queuing at UK airports by asking them to record the length of each delay:

http://www.ukairportdelays.co.uk/

[west lakes]

Though us brits may sometimes comment on the states, at least they try to help the SLF

http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov/index.html

Can't see BAA and others putting this sort of info on their sites:E

[ZFT]

Interesting comparison.

Traveled BKK-LHR-BKK last week.

Bangkok (which is an appalling airport in most respects) Check in to lounge 15 mins of which 5 mins was the walk to concourse C once I cleared immigration.
LHR T3 touch down to getting out of the worst airport in the civilized world 1 hr 20 mins
LHR T3 Check in the lounge 1 hr 5 mins
Bangkok touch down to getting in a taxi 25 mins and this was from gate C9 which is a marathon walk

With the BAA, how can you rate the unrateable?

[WHBM]

Heathrow T3 last Saturday morning :

American Airlines check-in. Over 75 minutes queueing. Even then we were eventually plucked from the main queue. In fact had we turned up an hour later we would have had a far shorter wait. Whole process of capturing the API information has not been thought through by AA, much timewasting at all the desks.

Security, relatively straightforward but still took about 20 minutes to get through.

Queue for a bacon roll and a coffee, another 15 minutes ! Then it turned out, only after paying, that there was a backup in the kitchen and it took ANOTHER 15 minutes for said bacon roll to make an appearence.

Now none of this is unexpected. We were told at AA check-in that "oh it's such a busy day". Well excuse me AA but you have exactly the same capacity with exactly the same all-777 flight programme at Heathrow every day, unvarying, and your typical load factors do not vary greatly from day to day either.

Regarding the take-away cafe concessionaire's gross disorganisation, BAA used to control their tenants closely for quality of service. In fact BAA used to describe this in their own ads. Presumably the people who used to monitor this have been made redundant, BAA realising they can get exactly the same income from their tenants whether they monitor quality or not, while cutting their own costs. What else is important to them ?

The cafe themselves did have a manager on duty who I discussed the delay with. It was a shame that despite being management, and despite the high prices compared to UK High Streets, she could not really speak English.

[PaperTiger]

Though us brits may sometimes comment on the states, at least they try to help the SLF
http://waittime.tsa.dhs.gov/index.html
Can't see BAA and others putting this sort of info on their sites. From the TSA website:The wait times are historical so please note actual wait time may vary depending on factors including weather delays which result in increased passenger levels.From the BTS website:TSA's survey measures actual wait times at random time points during peak periods by handing cards with the initial start time to randomly-selected passengers as they enter the queue. The card is collected and time stamped before the passenger walks through the metal detector. Thus the wait time includes the time spent from the beginning of the queue until the passenger reaches the metal detector and does not include time spent during the actual passenger screening. The TSA survey measures wait times at selected times, regardless of the number of passengers waiting in line, if any.IOW, largely useless on any given day. And there have been reports on flyers' boards about TSA screeners "gaming" the system by handing the cards to pax at the front of the line (or close to it) instead of the back.

Also does not include the lines to check-in (although that's the airlines' fault), nor the lines for the pre-screening ID checks, which at some airports considerably exceeds the time spent inside the TSA's screening "area".

It's doctored PR. Pure and simple. :=

[west lakes]

It's doctored PR. Pure and simple



Can't say I'm shocked:ugh: