Everyone has their peeves when it comes to airports. British airports frustrate with their insistence that we use their prissy little plastic baggies to stack our toiletries, like some game of cosmetological Tetris where we must choose between deodorant or maintaining some semblance of follicular control. Anxious flyers take issue with airports with short runways — such as Courchevel — or perilous, such as Vágar in the Faroe Islands (which has the thrill of sitting on a cliff edge and being buffeted by high winds and heavy fog). Personally, I would gladly exchange the risk of danger when considering my options than have to pass through those US hangars where everything is staffed by a computer and the food looks like the undigested remnants one discovers in a corpse.
Commercial airports give the lie to the idea that there remains any glamour in modern travel. For most people, it’s just a sweaty, smelly schlep. (Actually, private airports aren’t much better — they’re just commercial airports with big white leather sofas and a better class of nut.) And yet the more unpleasant the journey is becoming, the more we try to get away.
This week, Ryanair reported its most profitable December quarter on record, pulling in some €211 million ($359 million), and reiterated a profit forecast of between €1.325 billion and €1.425 billion in this financial year. The airline has rebounded from the pandemic, filling 93 per cent of seats. According to its chief executive Michael O’Leary, the cost of living crisis has only made people more determined to book that holiday. So determined, presumably, that passengers will waive the fact the airline is so grossly craven in its profit-hunting that they routinely charge a fee to choose a seat, in addition to the ticket we might foolishly assume would be sufficient to allow us to get on the plane. Yet Ryanair is only partly responsible for the culture of screwing passengers. From the bloated lounges and endless queueing to the missing luggage (the missing luggage!) and the costly extras, almost every single feature of the aeronautical experience is now a massive bore.
So why fly, say those who, mindful of the melting ice-caps, prefer to reach their destinations by unicycle or other worthy, less carbon-burning means? Here again, the experience is pretty dreadful: even Eurostar, once a portal to total chicness, has been reduced to a shabby simulacrum of its once fabulously lovely self. The enforcement of new border controls following Brexit has turned departures into a cattle station in which passengers are corralled in huge, amorphous queues. The trains, meanwhile, are packed to full capacity because they’ve had to scrap a load of services to allow the officers time to stamp the paperwork.
On the flip side, crappy travel expectations do make it all the more exciting when finally you reach somewhere in which everything just works. Having just been to Antwerp for a work trip, I’m considering revisiting for a holiday based on the ease of travel and calm in which we all arrived. And any chance to visit Copenhagen is one I’ll gladly seize. The airport is preposterously gigantic, but it’s jammed with obscenely attractive Scandinavians, serves tasty pastries at metre intervals and has an array of retail outlets in which to dawdle while you wait out your delays. Most significant, and magical of all, it boasts signage you could spot from Mars.
Written by: Jo Ellison
© Financial Times
