"Airports: The drawback of distance"

Tuesday, September 2, 2003

Airports: The drawback of distance
By Nick Easen
Cable News Network (CNN)


HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- When most people think of air travel they think of
taking off their shoes and putting on flight socks -- not donning a pair of
hiking boots. 

But as international out-of-town airports expand, the time people spend
walking through the sprawling terminals just gets longer and longer. 

Hong Kong is no exception, so much so that it has seen a surge in demand for
motorized transport within the terminals. 

Now time-pressured biz travelers get whisked along to passport control in a
golf-cart. 

For a fee, one hotel group even escorts guests directly from the airport
gate all the way in to the city center via a buggy and then a courtesy car. 

"Meet and greet is already popular for business travelers, this is just an
extension of it. The escorted service cuts the travel time down by at least
20 minutes and it has been very popular," Sally De Souza of the Mandarin
Oriental Group told CNN. 

"Indeed, there is no comparable service like this in Asia," said Vincent
Metais of Worldwide Flight Services in a statement. 

Yet De Souza says that it probably will not be long before other hotel
groups in Hong Kong and around the world begin to offer similar services in
order to cut the travel times for execs. 

>From Philadelphia to Singapore, international airports have grown into vast
rambling cities of tunnels and shopping malls. 

"Airports around the world are getting bigger, people have to do a lot of
walking these days with heavy baggage," adds De Souza. 

Some of the busiest on the planet have proposals to expand including London
Heathrow with terminal 5, Gatwick with two new runways and Chicago, O'Hare. 

This could increase the time that travelers take to move around the
terminals from passport control to departure gates and baggage claim areas. 

With the recent downturn in air travel, it is also the smaller airports that
have suffered slashes to services and the bottom line. 

In the medium term this could put more pressure on the larger hubs to expand
their sprawling sites not less. 

The other option is to stop thinking of airports as vast spaces that need to
be crossed in record time, but as living spaces where we should spend more
time not less. 

Recently in the UK's Independent on Sunday newspaper, architect Nigel Coates
suggested that Heathrow should have its own opera house -- suggesting that
people would go there for entertainment instead of travel.

Attached Photo:

Many airports hand out a chart of times it takes to get to the departure
gates, so you don't miss your flight.

story.hk.air.afp.jpg