Evil, capitalist airports

Agreed. But the services you describe are all very high maintenance, which equals expensive to provide. And there is no good model under which average travelers will (or can) pay for them.

I understand that the showers in the secret Double Platinum-Iridium Executive Frequent Flyer lounges are quite nice. But I don’t qualify for those either.

Cranky

These are good observations, but you should pack a clean pair of underwear if you expect to need them.

Don’t they sell underwear and some of the fancy shops in airports? I could swear I’ve seen it sold, though maybe it’s all of the fancy sort only worn by french women or something. They certainly sell such things at Penn Station, and I’m pretty sure they do at the Philadelphia airport.

Amen.

But I’m willing to bet that if you extracted the airport context from the airport, resulting in a mall, you’d see about the same level of foot traffic comparing the food court/main store places and the designer stores. But the markups on the latter are huge — helped along by the fact that they can extract some of the duty free margin for themselves.

Whereas the markup on showers is horrible — lots of space and utilities needed and the airlines are already giving it to the people most willing to pay.

And as someone above said, you’re not the airport “customer.” The airline is.

It’s a business riddled with disconnect between who uses it and who “pays” for it, plans it etc.

Some US airports also have senators-friendly bathrooms (entraping cops included)

Why fly at all – teleconference; no underwear necessary whatsoever. And if you can afford to fly a lot you probably are a Gucci customer.

As others have said, what generates more revenue and can pay more rent to the airport — a Gucci store or a shower concession?

Personally, I have to say that I pretty much always shower and put on clean underwear before leaving on a trip. The only times I’d ever have considered paying for underwear and a shower in an airport (can’t believe nobody’s made a Larry Craig joke yet, BTW), is during canceled flight / delay nightmares. But I’ve been caught in serious airport nightmares only a few times in my life — certainly not often enough to keep underwear and shower vendors in business.

Have any of you ever paid for a shower at a truck stop?

Sheeesh. Don’t tell me that’s not a profitable business. Even at “Free with 50 gallon fillup”.

I would like to see a better places or context within which to say goodbye. I have been shot dirty looks at Logan after kissing my same sex partner goodbye (we are often separated due to the fact that US won’t recognize our relationship for immigration purposes).

Heathrow, the other airport I frequent, varies by terminal. In T3, some gates are twenty minutes walk from the shopping loop and flights often go straight from no gate yet to final boarding. They keep you shopping and then make your run. Heathrow T4 is getting yotel any day now and Gatwick’s already got it. Yotel is pretty much a mini-hotel cabin with clean conveniences and an emphasis on relaxation at an okay price. One other thing I like about Heathrow compared to US airports is that prices are pretty much the same as they are at the same shops elsewhere. So, if I buy a toothbrush or chewing gum at Boots at the airport, I won’t being paying more than on the high street. US airports suck in this regard.

One thing you never see in an American airport, but that’s a commonplace elsewhere, is a Chemist — like Boots or what have you. Seeing as they’re fantastically useful, I’ve never understood why.

Heathrow has free showers that are sometimes even operational. OTOH it has pioneered the technique of making you walk *through* a duty-free, on a gently meandering course, to get to your damn gate.

Today’s WSJ reviews four U.S. airline clubs. Delta comes out OK; the Admiral’s Club sounds like a total ripoff. U.S. airport food is slowly becoming nonawful enough to make sit-down airport restaurants, where available, plausible ways to eat and wait comfortably.

The problem is, all of these services seem fantastically important and worth paying airport markup on the one time you need them, but not the ten times you don’t.

I’d love to see a Yotel at some of our more heavily-travelled hubs, and the KMart at Penn Station in NYC was incredibly helpful my last trip up, when I didn’t have the time to wander street-level for a clean shirt and deodorant after a 95-degree afternoon on the third deck at Yankee Stadium. But a bookstore (at home) or a tourist-trap gift shop (on the road) will get me to drop in on probably 50% of my trips, and those won’t. Conversely, the margin on a crappy electronics store or a luxury-goods place is high enough to support a much lower visit rate, but a sundry-goods store probably can’t hit that.

Slightly OT, what bothers me most about air travelling is having separate lines for first/business passengers (and of course “VIPs” and celebreties) for governmental processes, such as security and passport checking.

There used to be a shower place at the Honolulu airport, where it made perfect sense; you could get in one more day of touristing, then clean up before getting on a redeye back to the mainland.

But my last time there, they told me that it had been cut during the reconfiguration for post-9/11 security security changes…

JoshC: The problem is, all of these services seem fantastically important and worth paying airport markup on the one time you need them, but not the ten times you don’t.

The other big problem is that the one time you need them is going to be the one time everybody wants them (for example, when bad weather means delays across the board and an airport full of tired, cranky passengers waiting hours and hours for a flight). When you didn’t need a shower, the stalls would be readily available, and when you did, the line would be out the door and down the hall.

a: Slightly OT, what bothers me most about air travelling is having separate lines for first/business passengers.

I don’t mind — after all, those people subsidize our tickets by overpaying for a slightly wider, comfier seat for a few hours. If having a separate line tricks induces them to keep forking over the subsidy payments, I’m fine with that.

Everybody seems to have ignored the obvious fact here – International Airports are able to provide goods free of VAT and other taxes. Because luxury goods have a high tax markup, they can be offered at a significant discount in airports. Travellers seeing high quality goods (from digital cameras to watches to suits to cigarettes) at much lower prices than available on the high street seize the opportunity – for example after a long international flight I usually have a bottle or two of Bombay Sapphire purchased at 2/3 the price of my local offy.

BAA, which owns airports all over the world, generates 60% of its income from retail activity, and is listed as retail stock, rather than transportation stock. Heathrow is some ten times more profitable per sq.ft. than the average mall. 20% of all perfume in the UK is sold at Heathrow.

Airports are high pressure retail funnels, they compress consumers in a distracted state through commodity gates.

Strangely, almost all international airports also have some kind of ‘faith space’.

“So why the complete mismatch of trapped and exhausted consumers to luxury goods?”

As I understand it, it amounts to the fact that rents in airports are so high, that only shops with extraordinarily high margins (hence Gucci, Chanel, etc.), or businesses with extraordinarily high volumes, such as coffee shops and fast food, are profitable.

“Why does it have to be the airport that provides the services? Couldn’t Northwest, e.g., run a capsule hotel/showers/etc. in Detroit, American run one at O’Hare, etc.?”

Posted by Ben M ·

Because running something like that outside of the airport would add significant costs and travel times.

Or are travellers such a captive market that airports can completely ignore what they actually want…

Clearly I’m missing something. While I don’t travel a lot I travel a little bit and .. I’m never at the airport long enough for a nap. International transit airports (O’Hare? MPLS?) must be like Disneyland or something …

Also this – exercise requires a change of clothes and then you’re carrying sweaty gym clothes.

There are two airports which have all the desired services for free – Singapore and Amsterdam’s Schiphol. And as a tip, if you are flying through Singapore, take a swim-suit in your carry-on. Run to terminal 1; there is a lovely open air pool which you can use for S$10 (which also gets you a locker, access to a shower, and a clean towel).

Schiphol has sleeping pods and a shower, though I haven’t used the latter.

So all these people who mysteriously forget to pack clean underwear are going to remember their gym clothes?

Most of the luxury stores in airports strike me as merely pointless. (Does anyone really go shopping for Waterman pens or reflecting telescopes to carry on a flight?) But the one that really puzzles me is the high-end luggage stores. There’s one in every airport. And at first it sort of makes sense: airport, luggage—of course there’s a connection. But then you think about it for a couple more seconds and you start to realize how seriously strange it is. You’d think that luggage is the one thing you could be absolutely certain that nobody inside the secure area of an airport needs. Before a trip, yes. But at the airport? I still haven’t figured it out.

I, too, am astonished by how unpleasant airports are, and by the obvious business opportunities that could make them slightly less unpleasant.

matt austern / #45 – The luggage stores are to replace the luggage that’s gotten damaged after being thrown around. Makes sense from that perspective.

Because luxury goods have a high tax markup, they can be offered at a significant discount in airports.

In theory. When it’s just VAT, the markup to pay for the concession often means it’s a wash, especially if you have the chance to claim a sales tax or VAT refund when you bring stuff home. Though transit hubs are useful in this regard.

Booze and ciggies are another matter, but that’s more restricted within the EU. What’s left are the luxury or limited editions, the bottle of Johnny Walker Extortionate Label and suchlike.

As richard said, Schiphol is pretty good (showers, sleeping area) but you do need to go outside security to get to some of the bare-essentials shops, because the main (non-Schengen) area is all about the duty-frees. I’ve never been to the shopping, um, Meccas in the Gulf, but I suspect they’re rather short on functional knickers too.

American airports, especially those designed for pre-2001 security, are basically awful, and don’t even have the time-sink attraction of the massive duty-free section. Detroit Metropolitan, a main hub from Amsterdam, is a hermetically-sealed atrocity. And as Kieran said, no Boots. Fifteen magazine shops, but they basically extend to aspirin and travel-sickness pills.

Agree with others about Singapore. Hotel rooms, swimming pool, free internet, free movies showing, outside gardens (ironically as Singapore is one of the few places in the world where being outside is thoroughly unpleasant). A flight from Europe to NZ through Asia generally requires a day stopover somewhere and all those little luxuries definitely rate.

Though I think the poor tour guides on the free day trip must have an awfully depressing job – imagine spending your whole life talking to people who keep falling asleep.

Hong Kong airport is nice – they have a chemists there and free internet, but not as good as Singapore. On the plus side, you can check in to your flight and drop your luggage at the airline in central Hong Kong and then spend the day sightseeing.

Asian airports of course have good fast food.

52 posts and counting! Maria, you have plainly hit a nerve.
Munich airport, even though it’s named after the boorish populist Franz-Josef Strauss, has its own brewery: making not some tasteless global lager, but an unfiltered connoisseur’s Weissbier.

The same logic that spoils airports will soon apply to super-jumbo jets. We will get more expensive tat shopping instead of what we need, viz: a library, an infirmary, showers, and an exercise room.

Frankfurt airport has a Junkers-themed bar, with pictures of Ju-52 (as seen over Crete!) and Ju-88 (as seen over Kent!) on the walls. Beat that.

I particularly like the service that for a few pounds winds a huge cellophane wrap around your suitcase, although I have never had the courage to try it myself. And neither have I had my shoes polished, but I’m pleased that the service is on offer just in case.

But in Singapore – don’t they hang you there if you’re caught not taking shower for two days? Especially in the airport while being a foreigner? So, a free shower is the least you should expect from them.

I have used the shower at Shipol, it is actually quite clean. It has a nap area, equipped with what look like recliners, tho all of it was taken by the time I got there. Got to say it is by far passenger friendliest airport in europe on the way from US to India. But now that I have 2 under 3 yr old terrors to travel with me, what I would like to see is a decent play area that will keep the little ones occupied, and I will not have to keep repeating “don’t drop that, it is very very expensive…”
Desimom

McDonalds, dougnuts, and the local variety of fried, sugary dross to add a sugar hangover to your jetlag.

I don’t recall ever seeing ‘DougNuts’ in the airport; I don’t think I would like to…

the Pittsburgh Int’l Airport has some of the aforementioned amenities (it’s too small and non-hubby to offer/need shower/nap facilities) and features no-markup shops (the lease requires matching prices at non-airporrt locations), including a rather nice sock shop (at least as desirable post-flight as new undies). And this was done intentionally, to help boost the city as a destination. But, even though it has been highly ranked in national surveys, the strategy has had little success. No one chooses a destination for its airport.

Well that’s gratifying. The matching price requirement is especially smart. True, no one chooses a destination solely for its airport, but with conventions and similar events it’s hard not think it’s a factor.

Singapore is definitely the best airport I’ve ever been in, especially if you’re a smoker. Instead of a cramped room with air you can scarcely see through, you get a freaking garden.

The one thing every airport should have but almost never does is an internet cafe. Wifi is better than nothing, but only if you have a laptop.

Hellooo?

Since when were the airports “capitalist?”

Eminent domain, massive government subsidies . . .

The airlines are operating in ANYTHING but a free market.

Really depends on the destination. Most hub airports have gotten better at selling travel necessities in the last decade and the range of food available has improved, even at places like Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson where the healtiest thing on the menu for many years was frozen yogurt.

Showers often are hidden–took me a while and questioning of many people but I found them at Frankfurt. United has “Arrivals by United” at most of its international hubs with Shower services.

It would be nice to get some cheap clothing or at least functional clothing. The new terminal at Seattle has an “ex-officio” store which sells very functional, but ggenerally expensive travel gear. Still more useful than many places. DC’s National airport has a Jos. A. Bank which , at least helps when you don’t have a clean shirt.

They could just provide the shower at the security checkpoint and we could all walk through naked.

Hey, it would be simpler.

True story…at the San Diego airport I was trying to buy a pen to use on the plane…all the shops had were multi-colored “teenage girl” type pens that wrote in various luminescent colors. No Bic or any other regular pen. How out of touch are vendors in airports?

I want to second (or third) those who question the need for an exercise facility in an airport. What an earth do you need that for? There is plenty of room for a brisk walk in any airport. Floor space is available for stretching and calisthenics.

My old Taekwondo grandmaster used to basically work out while waiting at the gate. While wearing a nice suit he’d do a 100 pushups and situps and what have you.

Of course, a ninth-degree black belt generally doesn’t worry about what anybody thinks.

Earlier this year I was in the San Francisco airport, traveling back to NYC. I decided that I would finally splurge on a pair of expensive Bose noise-cancelling headphones, just so that I could make the cross-country trip home more pleasant. (Plus, I knew I’d have some more business travel coming up.)

Lucky me, the airport was plastered with huge ads for Bose’s QuietComfort headphones. I was in luck! Only… none of the electronics stores (including fancy-ridiculous places like Brookstone) carried Bose. Anywhere. In the entire airport. (I had a bunch of time before my flight, and believe me, I looked everywhere.)

So even when I did want to buy a high-end luxury item in an airport, the people supposedly trying to sell it to me couldn’t get it right!

Mindless rant if ever there was one. Airports are the product of the nationalized/managed economy school of business. Free them up to market forces and, if people indeed want those things, you’ll see them implemented.

Evil? Socialism is evil.

80: I got onto a plane one fine Sunday morning in Biloxi and who else should I find on board? Van Halen. Apparently there was only one flight out early (ish) on Sunday. I got an autographed barf bag out of the deal.

63: Dougnuts are neither well known nor properly appreciated. Be sure to observe a limit of two, though, lest you end up with a three Doug night.

Agree with 54 about airports and children.

Munich has a fairly large ‘lego-pit’in one terminal – with outsize lego – which is pretty good.

Munich also enabled me to find a nice bow-tie at short notice when flying to New York for a wedding.
(my own).

…airline security…

Why, I suppose that was the kind of security consumers wanted.

I find it odd, though, that evil socialists prefer Gucci to K-Mart.

As long as an airport has clean, “friendly” bathrooms than I am happy.

The new airports all across Asia, in all the major centres, have all of these services, run by private concerns, for profit, they are very affordable, and it’s lovely, and they are CLEAN. They also have smoking rooms. I don’t know what N. America’s problem is (I’m an expat and find travel on that side barbaric.) The flights offer full service, even on a 90-minute flight between Seoul and anywhere in Japan– meal and free beverages (alcohol incl.) Travel in Asia is nice, but I hate travel in N. America.

I smoke unfiltered Camels, and better or equal cigarettes can’t be found everywhere. France, Britain, the Netherlands, Japan, sure, but at best what’s on offer elsewhere in the EU are lamentably attenuated local products. One’s generally well advised to bring one’s own.

Except that every so often the duty free shop stocks my brand for ten bucks less than I shell out at Circle K. I suppose I ought to pay more attention to which airline flies out of which terminal at LAX.

As several people (32, 62) pointed out the Pittsburgh airport has quite a few amenities. The one not mentioned though is that they do have clean underwear in the form of an in airport Victoria’s Secret.