As the son of a career Foreign Service Officer, our family moved every 18 months, changing countries, climates, and languages. Starting in the 1950s, much of the travel was by ship. It is hard to imagine 2025 climbing on a boat in Jakarta and three weeks later climbing off in Genoa – across the Indian Ocean with a quick stop in Colombo where I remember swimming with an elephant on the beach and going through the Suez Canal. My mother resisted air travel – “Long Distance flying is for the birds”. No phones, no TV, no movies, no messages, maybe some short-wave radio. It wasn’t until the early 60s we started climbing on airplanes. My first long-distance solo travel was going from Boston to Manila in 1969. The plane filled up in Seattle with soldiers heading for Vietnam. The boy next to me cried across the Pacific. As we landed in Tokyo some dignitaries were arriving and a 21-gun salute went off at the airport. The vast on the plane hit the ground. It was chaos, but still, the magic of air travel had hit and I focused my life/career on getting global. By my count over the past fifty years, I have flown in or out of more than 200 airports in some 50 countries. Some were just airstrips but most were commercial airports. The world has shrunk. And while I’ve flown in a Concorde only a few times swimming with the elephants in Sri Lanka is a distant dream.
The modern airport is a version of Cold War Berlin – a city divided.
My career started as a testing agent for prototype branch banks and stores. Using cameras, and observers our sophistication grew and it wasn’t long before we added work at airports and train stations. From Logan in Boston to Indira Gandhi in India, Kimpo in Korea and Heathrow the list grew.
The modern airport is a version of Cold War Berlin – a city divided. In the bits called landside and airside, separated by the wall of security and our version of Check-Point Charlie. The TSA guards bark about laptops and liquids, the security checks are perfunctory and arbitrary. The entire concept of an airport and its security system could not be more miserable.
For those of us traveling in North America, the experience varies widely according to the age of the airport. To my road warrior eye, the ancient Kennedy and O’Hare represent the low end of the spectrum. Denver, Pittsburgh, and the Detroit airports are better. No American airport comes close to Dubai, Amsterdam, or Singapore and those facilities still have serious flaws. Everyone who travels anywhere in the world has horror stories.
The starting point for the design of an airport is the aircraft the facility expects to service. Knowledge and experience in runway lengths, the thickness of concrete, and the building configurations needed for specific airplanes are paramount in the choice of the agency retained to design and build an airport. Retail, much less some sophistication in the needs of travelers is way down on the priority list. One simple observation – airport retail design does not recognize that thanks to rolling suitcases, the aisle configurations need to be treated as if everyone is pulling rather than pushing a baby stroller.
The management of many major airports like Heathrow and Gatwick has been privatized. In North America, many airports are controlled by autonomous agencies (like the Port Authority which operates the New York metro airports) whose vulnerability to the traveling public is tenuous. Retail for them is a way either of re-cooping costs and/or making a contribution to operating margins. Given that airports are public facilities and feed off of a strictly captive market the balance between public service and private enterprise needs attention. Who is willing to pay the rent and who should be there are big issues – duty-free and luxury brands on one side of the equation and food service and other non-luxury retail on the other.
In our airport work, we tracked the travelers from the moment they stepped off the curb (from whatever transportation brought them to the airport or station to the moment they boarded on the airplane or train. It was a complex research assignment. To most of us who travel extensively it wasn’t just a job but it was very personal. We wanted to make a difference.
Much of it was just stopwatch work. Of the total time at the airport, a third of it is spent landside or roughly thirty-plus minutes. That includes checking in and getting through security. Thirty percent of travelers buy food or beverages landside, two percent shop for non-food and beverages and thirteen percent use a restroom. On the Airside we average more than an hour (and in some airports, the airside wait time can be hours), sixty-five percent shop/purchase food and beverage items, sixty-nine percent shop, and forty-three percent use a restroom.
With many airlines cutting back on inflight service the eating and drinking part is completely understandable. The toilet in the economy section of a full airplane is one filthiest places you find in the public domain in the first world.
Airports are not going to get better in the near term.
We learn from experience to do our business before and after we get off the plane if we possibly can.
Airports are suffering also with the contrast between the experienced and novice traveler. Walk the corridors of the Atlanta Airport the novices are easy to spot based on their movement and cluelessness. The contrast is even greater in Qatar and Istanbul where the cultural crossroads are even more stark.
In meetings with airport planning and management agencies across the world, we have been surprised at how little airports actually know about the traveling experience. While many facilities and airlines run customer satisfaction surveys, the breakdown of who went where, and for how long is still largely unknown.
Airports are not going to get better in the near term.
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