T5 Experience for Transit Passengers

My wife and I got off the plane at 6.45 am on Sunday morning.  After queuing and being checked for over an hour we finally made it into the Terminal ‘proper’ at around 8.00 am.  That’s an hour and a quarter to clear immigration.

There were four queues to negotiate when getting off the plane at T5. They all took place in a hot, airless, basement of the terminal.  Not very welcoming to foreign passengers.

• The first queue was to actually get into the hall where we had our boarding card checked. Essentially, we were transit passengers.  This queue split us into UK passports and everybody else. Luckily, our UK passport queue seemed shorter than everybody else – god knows how long they had to wait.
• The next (for us) fairly short queue was to get our passports checked. Everybody else seemed to have very long additional waits to get their passports checked.
• The third queue was to get our pictures taken.   This took a LONG time. I wonder how long they keep the pictures.  Knowing the previous Labour government, probably ‘forever’ is the retention time.
• The fourth, final, tedious, queue was to get our hand luggage scanned. Luckily we weren’t the lucky few who got a very, very personal pat down from the security staff.

And all this took over an hour.  It is was also staffed by grumpy, bored, unsmiling security staff who treated is like cattle to be processed.  And the joke is: we paid for this as part of our plane ticket price.  We were the customer.  You’d never know it.

We were finally ejected from the security circus into a shopping centre. Not a calm place where you can relax between flights or before setting off on your first one. Nope. An incredibly busy, over bright, shiny, steel and glass edifice with widely spaced shops and hardly any seats. A place where the restaurants are not grouped in one place, but are scattered to the four corners of the Terminal. Choosing a restaurant means walking the entire length of the terminal, passing the oh-so-important shops of course.

After waiting over an hour in the queues, we also needed to use the toilets. Considering the sheer quantity of people that were stuffed into T5 it was a surprise that there weren’t more toilets. There were long queues at both the ladies and gents toilets. This is the first time I have experienced that at an airport here or abroad. You’d think that, when designing a terminal, you would get something as basic as the number of toilets for the expected number of people in the terminal.

Leaving the terminal to get on to a plane was also tedious. We were checked twice at the gate and again stood in a slow moving queue. The main culprit this time was having our photo checked. Then we had our boarding cards checked before getting onto the plane.

Finally, because Heathrow was so busy, after pushing back from the terminal, the plane was still trundling around the airport 30 minutes later before finally taking off 20 minutes late. Normal day at Heathrow I suppose.

Design Goals for Terminal 5

It’s not entirely clear what the design goals for T5 were but the outcome for us was not a particularly pleasant customer experience. It feels less like an airport terminal and more like a shopping centre which happens to have air passengers in it. Maybe BAA were more concerned with maximising revenue per passenger and less concerned with comfort, relaxation or a calm, friendly, passenger experience?

I’m going to compare Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam with Heathrow because I have had experience with both. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. They are so different that the only thing they seem to have in common is that they are both called ‘terminals’. Being in transit at Schiphol goes roughly like this.

1. Get off plane
2. Walk for 5 minutes or so to the centre of the terminal.
3. Make a choice in whether to eat, shop or relax.
4. Go to the appropriate zone
5. When ready to the gate
6. Be checked at the gate which includes the baggage check, passport check and boarding card.  This doesn’t seem to take very long at all.
7. Get on plane and depart.  From push back you are in the air within 10 minutes.

Each airports apparent attitude to security and their passengers results in very different passenger experiences. Whereas Heathrow is completely paranoid about security, Schiphol, to me, seems more pragmatic. Heathrow tries very, very hard to ensure everybody in the terminal has been checked before you get in.  At Schiphol they check you just before you get on the plane.

One of the problems with Heathrow seems to be the requirement to photograph everybody coming into the terminal and then check it on the way out. The results in delays and long queues aside from being an invasion of privacy. The overly paranoid security policy at the airport creates the rest of the delays. Besides, it’s theatre; Bruce Schneier has a lot to say on this.

T5 wants passengers to shop ’till they drop? Schiphol thinks it’s optional. T5 doesn’t want you sitting down? Schiphol provides relaxation couches around the airport. T5 makes you walk past shops whilst trying to choose where to eat. Schiphol puts them all in the same place. And Schiphol never seems to have queues in their toilets.

In summary

Heathrow T5 fails because it is designed with lots of security theatre and as a shopping centre. That’s the security processes that make us feel safe without actually doing anything about security. Long delays and miserable, bored and unfriendly security staff aren’t going to make passengers feel welcome. The apparent emphasis on extracting cash from travellers rather than giving them somewhere to relax isn’t going to help either.

I’m going to avoid Heathrow T5, which also sadly means British Airways, in future.

I had the ‘pleasure’ of travelling through Heathrow T5 twice during my holiday to Thonon les Bains on Lac Leman which is reached via Geneva.  On paper, the flights look fine; catch the BA plane to Heathrow, two hours at Heathrow and then catch your onward flight to Geneva.  On the return journey, three hours are offered at Heathrow – little did I know it was to clear security.

On the way out to Geneva, the plane was delayed by nearly an hour waiting at the gate.  However, desipte a 2 hour transfer time (not including the extra delay) our bags failed to make the connection from Newcastle and didn’t travel with us.  That’s everybody who flew from Newcastle to Geneva, six in total; not one of us was joined by our bags on the flight.  The bags did eventually turn up on the next flight and were delivered to us after a 5 hour delay. The baggage company at Geneva were not surprised; it seems that bags are far more frequently delayed from T5 than any other airport in the developed world.

However, it only got worse on the way back.  First we were delayed in Geneva because there was no slot available at Heathrow.  Then, even when we were given a slot at Heathrow, when the plane arrived at the airport’s airspace we were delayed again.

Then the plane was parked away from the terminal as there were no stands available.  Normally buses await to take the passengers to the terminal.  Except there weren’t any.  For 30 minutes.   None of the ground staff seemed to have any sense of urgency.  The bus driver even seemed to wait with the bus full despite several panicked American passengers on short transfers – they didn’t stand a chance with T5.  But when we were finally delivered to the terminal the fun really began.  We didn’t get to the T5 shopping centre for another 30 minutes.

Queues seem to be the norm at T5.  Firstly, there was a ludicrous queue after getting to T5.  It transpired that at the head of this queue was a small woman asking people whether they were transferring to local or international flights.  She was completely pointless because the hall immediately behind her was full of signs directing you where to go if you were transferring to a local or international flight.  She had no purpose whatsoever.  Utterly unbelievable and the first 10 minutes of waiting.

Next we queued to have our boarding passes checked.  After that another queue to have our passports checked.  Finally, both the local and international passengers were shepherded to yet another security check.  Together.  Why we were split up into different queues is anybodies guess as both the national and international passengers had boarding card and passport checks.  The final security check is the one where you take your belt off, take your laptop out, etc.  This took another 15 to 20 minutes.  Why?  Why?  Because the staff were just slow.  Inept too, probably, but generally very, very slow at staring at the computer monitor that displays the innards of cases, jackets, purses and other assorted bags. Incredibly slow.  In Newcastle this queue usually takes about 5 minutes.  The queue for our machine was on 10 or so people long yet took nearly 20 minutes …  I dispaired.

All told from the moment of touching down to getting into T5 took over an hour; it would have been 30-40 minutes at best even if we had got to a stand.  What a disgraceful way of treating people arriving at supposedly the most advanced passenger terminal in the world.  I imagine the American passengers on short transfers missed their flights.  There bags almost certainly will have done.

However, once in T5 proper you understand that it isn’t for passengers to relax waiting for their flight.  No, it’s only purpose is to extract money; it’s simply a glorified shopping mall.  All we wanted to do was get some lunch and then find somewhere comfortable for our next flight.  Instead, there are precious few places to eat and virtually no where to actually sit.  Unless you have an executive lounge pass that is.  T5, which because of its size, should feel spacious, yet feels claustrophobic, cluttered, noisy and generally unpleasant.

Even when we boarded our flight to Newcastle the madness of Heathrow didn’t end.  We ended up staying a further hour at the stand and taxiing before we finally took off.  Because they are operating at full capacity.

That seems to be the problem.  There are simply too many passengers.  They don’t need another runway; they need less passengers.  The current ‘systems’ at T5 don’t seem to be able to cope.  Most of the staff have a ‘learned helplessness’ air around them.

Heathrow needs proper competition.  Maybe BAA needs to be broken up so that Gatwick and Stansted can offer real competition to Heathrow to force it to buck its ideas up and provide a proper service to its passengers.  The security theatre is a joke; I don’t feel more secure, just that I’m having my time wasted.  We are paying customers; yet we pay to be treated like cattle.  I’m not sure why we put up with it.  Yet another reason for competition, but perhaps in a different way.  If there was an airport that didn’t treat you like cattle and actually treated you like paying customers then I would definitely fly through there, even if it was a bit more expensive.

BAA is bad for Heathrow and bad for British Airways.  The sooner it is broken up the better.