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Comments (216)

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  patchorang
  I can't agree more. I was once catching a flight, went to my gate and found no one there and the flight status monitors saying "Cancelled". I couldn't find an agent at any desk, so went back out of security to check-in to figure out what was going on. The agent proceeded to act like I was the biggest idiot in the world for leaving the gate because "we don't control those boards, your flight isn't cancelled, the gate was changed". So I had to run back through security to barely catch my flight.Another place I experience this phenomenon is bike shops. They'll start talking to you with specialized vocabulary and won't give you the time of day if you don't know exactly what they're talking about. Yet, I brought my bike to the bike shop because I'm not an expert bike mechanic. Funny enough, I couldn't find a bike shop that wasn't like this so with the help of youtube I do all my own bike work now.
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  foo-bar-baz529
  I dislike the sense of judgment from TSA officials when I don’t correctly predict which items they do/don’t want me to put in the tray. It’s not my fault that different airports seem to have completely different rules for the same items.
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  piinbinary
  This has some lessons that apply much more broadly than to just airports (e.g. apps that make you jump through hoops and expect you to know what 2fa or SSO mean)
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  neko_ranger
  Am I crazy or are the general workers at most US airports of dubious quality at best?
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  xvxvx
  Last time I flew, it was with United and I highly recommend their app. Clearly designed by people who know airports suck. It automated everything, from checkin and tickets, kept me updated on flights and gates, mapped them out and told me how long it would take to get to the gate and where security lines were the longest. Even tracked my checked luggage.
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  superxpro12
  i think that 90% of these problems would be solved by an easily accessible, standardized map of each airport.When i attempted to find airport maps, I was met with a mess of mobile apps, mobile website pdf's, and an enormous amount of text.Just... give me an easy to use map. Call out the obvious use cases like "how to transfer terminals" and "your bags will/will-not be checked through".
• Retr0id
  I suspect airports could be a whole lot simpler if the notions of "security" and "border control" didn't exist or were otherwise relaxed.
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  mikeocool
  My favorite but of airport-ese that emerged post-9/11 is that on most US airlines you can now have 1 carry-on and 1 personal item.As far as I can tell the difference between them is that a personal item can't have wheels.
• pkrecker
  One time in 2013 I was flying from San Francisco to Phoenix with a layover in LA. I purchased my ticket directly from United, the flights had a UAXXXX flight number, and the printed tickets I got when I checked in had United branding on them.I got to LAX and I proceeded to try to find my UA flight, but the flight number was nowhere to be found. I waited a bit and when it still didn’t show up on the monitor, I asked a gate agent. The agent looked at my ticket and told me to keep waiting.Eventually I started to get worried as my departure time was approaching. I asked another gate agent, and this time I was informed my flight was not a United flight at all! It was a US Airways flight. Also, it was in a completely different terminal. Also, at LAX to move between terminals you have to exit security and hike across parking structures and parking lots. There was no way I would make my flight.I looked at my ticket and sure enough, in small print it said “operated by US airways.” I hadn’t even noticed this, but even if I had, how was I supposed to know that this meant it was literally not a United flight at all?Thankfully a friendly customer service agent took mercy on me and got me booked on an American flight later that day.I later learned from a flight attendant friend that this was called a “code share” and it was subsequently changed to make it more user friendly.There are a million things like this I don’t even think about anymore because I travel so much. But when I think back to those days of early adulthood I remember how stressful and confusing airports could be.
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  joshstrange
  In Lexington, KY I was chided for taking out my laptop "You don't need to do that" and then at Dallas Fort Worth I got chided for not taking out my laptop. Kafkaesque is the best word I have to describe it. Turns out Lexington has nicer/newer scanners and somehow I'm supposed to know which scanners you need to take your laptop out for.Additionally I want to make a scene every time I hand over documents and get told "I don't need this" since if I hadn't provided that ID/Passport/Boarding pass there was an equal chance I'd get berated for not providing it. There is zero empathy for the traveller. If I walk forward I get yelled at, if I wait to be called I get yelled at, it's infuriating. Everything about the airport feels like a lose-lose scenario to me.I don't fly that often and every time I do I hate the airport experience so much because I feel like I'm constantly doing _something_ wrong.The security theater of the TSA is just the moldy cherry on top of the shit sundae that is flying.
• VeninVidiaVicii
  Everything you’re saying is how I feel as a native English speaker and it drives me absolutely nuts. People in airports are obsessed with telling you what you can’t do.The one thing that kind of works for me is, “Well, what should I do?” when they bark orders about what I can’t do.“You can’t have your boarding pass in your hand!”, when you’re in the x-ray. “Where should I put it now?”Oh well, it turns out I actually can have it in my hand. Thanks.
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  charlesabarnes
  Experienced travelers also often face troubled, contradictory instructions from airport staff seemingly at random.The experience doesn't have to be so stressful and confusing, but I'm not sure how to fix it.
• MotoriX
  Navigation in a lot of public places is pretty bad. I think interactive maps on small terminals could help a lot. Personally, I find it much easier to understand things from a map, especially when it shows exactly where you are.
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  59percentmore
  This shouldn't really be directed at people who work at the airport. Almost everything mentioned is the fault of the people who designed the airport and the people who run the airport.The latter group are so, so happy that you addressed the former, and not them. They have successfully avoided the inconvenience and scrutiny that would prompt them to change. (Of course, between Abe and the UHC guy, taking your complaints directly to an executive also seems to be effective, if not even more so.)
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  igornotarobot
  How about two different planes departing to exactly the same destination at exactly the same time from two different terminals? That's how I missed my plane from Belgrade to Vienna. I have no other explanation but that they do it on purpose.
• willcodeforfoo
  Reminds me of a really beautiful song by Nickel Creek, To The Airport: https://genius.com/Nickel-creek-to-the-airport-lyricsThere's a of implicit knowledge in that environment.
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  andsoitis
  > She was anxious, because you instilled a sense of panic in her.That's not why she was anxious! She was anxious because, according to author's own account, this is someone:a) flying for the first timeb) hardly speaks Englishc) is in a foreign countryd) solo responsible for 4 grand kids running aroundetc.Blaming the airport staff who have to optimize for the greater good is quite something.
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  Cider9986
  We do not need everyones bags to be scanned. We do not need everyones bodies to be scanned. We do not need facial recognition at TSA, to board international flights, and to enter the country. We do not need to ban cash at airports. We do not need to take off our shoes (ig that changed). We do not need to restrict liquids.It's a bunch of baloney.
• jasonhong
  Replace "passengers" with "users" and replace "airport workers" with "product team members", and you have a good argument for why good usability and good service design really matter in the world.
• arun-mani-j
  I traveled in the flight for the first time 2 months back and I find this article so similar to my experience.I had so much confusion on the entire protocols on what is allowed and what is not and all those terminologies, such that a week before travel, I had my friend do a full end-to-end guide on everything we must do since entering an airport to coming out of it.Even then when I visited it, it was a little different than what my friend told me. But thankfully it is not a rushy airport, so I frankly told my situation to the person issuing boarding pass and he told me in detailed manner everything (my biggest confusion was with luggages).Unlike a bus or train which you can at the worst case run through and board, for airplanes, you need to go through a lot of checkings and phew...When in flight, there were a few instructions, messages from pilot etc. However they spoke so fast that it was so unclear. The passangers around me were also talking a little loudly, so I couldn't understand anything.May be from what I understand, these instructions are so regular, so people who frequent flights find it boring.For me it was both curiosity and feae of missing important details. And since it was India, they said the instructions in both English and Hindi only (I know only a little Hindi), even though the flights were for different language speaking region.At the end, it somehow ended up fine. But I think if it were my parents in my place, the journey could have been a nightmare :)
• Aeolun
  Like, I hate the sheer size of Schiphol, but I’m never wondering where anything is, and if I need to get there I can always get there by sprinting. I like that part of it.
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  maeln
  I hate airport. From having to arrive many hours early to a place out of the city and often poorly connected by public transport, expensive to park if you dare take your car, extremely expensive if you take a taxi or be left wherever if you take an uber. Then you have to find your way through huge, terminal to find your gate, understand the arbitrary rules of the airlines you were forced to choose, having your stuff messed with by security, having the constant pressure of time, only for the airline to be hours late with no compensation. And so many more.Nowadays, if I can take a train, I take the train. At least where I live, the train stations are almost always in the city, very well-connected, are more comfortable, you can arrive very late at the train station since there is no gate, no security, no bullshit. And even if the trip is 3-4h longer with a train, you can make up for it by not having to show up minimum 1 hour early at the airport, then having to wait 1 hour for a slow bus that takes you from the airport to the actual city center, or take a taxi and give them all your life savings.
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  jonhohle
  What’s crazy is that this is the list of things that are wrong when everything is going right.I was at O’hare for the first time in a few decades a few weeks ago and my flight was delayed due to some mechanical issue with the assigned plane. At least that’s what the app said. Because of the delay, the gate kept changing. We were supposed to know this because every once in a while the gate we were at no longer said it was our flight, so there must be some other location. I think at least one of the times it was mentioned over the PA, but besides the flight number everything else was unintelligible.We see other flights to our destination that were scheduled after ours from the same airline on the same type of plane boarding and leaving. It doesn’t matter that our tickets were from earlier in the day. They’ve already screwed over 150 passengers. Screwing them over more is far less bad than delaying them slightly but having to also delay later flights by a little bit, too. I think we watched three flights leave. As a group of six, with four children, the likelihood of standby coming through on any of these is less than zero.On the departure board the flight was referred to by a carrier other than the one we bought the tickets from, because of course everyone should know every carrier’s partner airlines and how their flight numbers map.Three hours of delay had arrived but the plane was finally at the gate. FAA says I’m entitled to a meal for the delay, so I go ask how to redeem it. I’m told to go back to customer service near security and stand in a line to get a voucher. But if I miss the flight, there’s nothing they can do about it. I’m sure that’s not how that’s supposed to work, but I’m several hours delayed already, my plans for the day are shot, missing the flight it really an option just so I can get some airport food.The time has arrived to start boarding. I’m on chat complaining about the service when it disconnects. The app stops working, so I check the airline’s website, and get a hard down, unstyled error message. I tell my wife that something seems wrong with their site and have my suspicion confirmed a few minutes later that their entire system is down and all flights are halted until further notice. No ETA.At this point Reddit has more information about what’s happening than the gate agent. It’s another 45 minutes before a mumbly PA announcement tells us flights are delayed due to a global system wide outage.Fortunately, their IT staff seemed to be on it, and the whole thing only lasted an hour. Then they put us on the plane like nothing happened and even got people to cheer for the crap service. Ice water in hell, I suppose.
• piker
  Absolutely! I travel a LOT, am able-bodied and frequent the same airports, and I am routinely confused and anxious.Bad call-out to Heathrow though where they’re amongst the best in the world at this.
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  aqme28
  I flew out of JFK a few days ago. Delta has about 50 check-in kiosk, and a few gate agents. With so many terminals, I was wondering why the area was so packed, with ten-minute lines to use an check-in kiosk.I went to see a gate agent because I had a question. Right after yelling at someone else for the same reason, they told me "No, you have to use the kiosks."By the time I got to the check-in kiosks I figured it out. Maybe they worked for some people but it had to be like 20% at best. Everyone else had to have help, myself included. It wouldn't scan my passport for the first 5 attempts, and then it wouldnt print my bag tag so I had to see the agent anyways.What is the purpose of an automated system that drives everyone to the manual system? It just added an extra step.Sorry for venting.
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  NoDodgeQuestion
  Post title should be, Dear people who design the airport, not Dear people who work at the airport.
• Kinrany
  Funny. I love flying partly for the very reason that airports need to be idiot-proof.
• PsylentKnight
  I think a lot of the reason this generation is starting to become very pro-train is because of how fucking awful airports are
• hmokiguess
  Expectation is the source of frustration. Embrace the chaos, accept the journey.
• Insanity
  The signage and rules can be confusing, but I don’t recall bad experiences with airport staff. They are just trying to do their job in a hectic place. I don’t believe they are intentionally being difficult, and honestly everyone can have a bad day.
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  josefritzishere
  Everyone over 40 knows how terrible air travel has become.
• anon
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  casion
  I've just hit 2 million miles last week.All of this is true, and no matter how much you do it, it's still all true.I can't even keep track of what I'm supposed to do at my own home airport that I've been to thousands of times. Some people know me on a first name basis there, and still act judgmental when something was (seemingly randomly) changed and I don't know about it.TSA is by far the worst in the USA though. Their expectation that you do exactly what you should, without telling you what to do, while constantly changing the rules, is infuriating. Often there'll be 2-3 lines and DESPITE HAVING THE SAME SCANNERS, they'll have different unspoken rules that you are literally yelled at over.
• bartread
  I will do almost anything to avoid flying, at least short haul. I don’t mind flying: I have no fear of it at all in fact. But I absolutely despise the airport experience, and consider it to be so unpleasant as to be worth avoiding whenever it’s at all feasible to travel by other means.
• tengbretson
  > we passengers are trying our best100% disagree.
• anticorporate
  I mean, almost by definition half of the time people are going through an airport, it's not their home airport. Probably more than half because people chain trips (and even more than that if you count people with a layover). It would make sense for the default assumption when interacting with a visitor is that they've never been there before and are unaware of your procedures.
• AndrewKemendo
  My observation is that on average, the world is too complex and confusing for the vast majority of people to operate in it without significant struggle.
• sergiotapia
  I feel differently, after travelling a bit all the airports are so cookie cutter I was in awe of the human effort required to reach this point of harmony.It's all so organized and simple and zero need to rush. They even have signs in all major languages, it's nuts!Source: SF, Miami, New York, Bolivia, Argentina, Texas - all kind of the same all over. Like visiting different Wawa's.
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  fryanyway_swe
  >The poor elderly Indian woman who you just told to "keep the gate area clear" does not, and she wasn't trying to make your life more difficultWe need to go back to when flying was for the elites only.For the climate, of course.
• tamimio
  In Montreal airport few months ago, going through the TSA check: shoes off, laptop out in a separate bin etc etc then the giant rotating MRI, I mean xray, then at the end they took my carry on for further inspection, after waiting for around 30min for my turn, it turned out because I have half full bottle of water.. I told him to toss it and just hand me the bag, he refused, and asked me to wait another 15min, then he escorted me before the TSA check point, and told me to pour the water in specific garbage/container, I did, and he left me with bag open at the beginning, so I put everything inside and wanted to pass the TSA, the guys who just saw me being escorted from the inside, refused to let me pass without doing the whole check again, so, shoes off, rotating xray, etc etc, and this time plus extra manual search or whatever it’s called, maybe because I dared to challenge their authority. The whole process took around an hour, for a half full bottle of water I bought from the airport.This not the only story, there are many stories, like the one time they politely asked me to keep my bag at the front door of the airplane because there’s no enough space (I found inside people with three pieces tho), silly me I thought I will take it when I leave only to find they checked it, and the rest of the trip I was left with nothing but my passport (luckily I had it with me or I will be stranded), only to find some of my stuff got stolen from my bag and a broken laptop.The first story however is the symbolization of the infamous Canadian bureaucracy in anything government wise, what something could be solved in one step quickly, gets convoluted with so many steps because who ever designed them is either out of touch of reality and needs to touch some grass, or just straight up moron, the same applies for hospitals ER btw, it’s not “short staff” as they claim, it’s just a poor process design.
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  mschuster91
  > Upon seeing this, the experienced visitor to this sceptred isle knows to smartly turn on their heel because B45 is right behind them, but we occasional travellers don't.Railways aren't much better. German railways are bad enough, but Eastern Europe... good luck even finding a realtime track schedule, and screw you if you don't speak the language. Last time in Rijeka there was construction going on but no indications anywhere, my fellow travellers were lucky I spoke Croatian and recognized that the attendant was shouting in Croatian for the people on what should have been a train...
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  raverbashing
  While I found this rant mostly annoying:> When we try to find gate B45, we encounter the following sign:(see board with 2 B45 gates)Well, yes. This is wrong. And confusing. But mostly wrong
• shdwslrkr
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  chasd00
  This is currently the #4 story on the home page, an article about someone complaining about not being able to figure out an airport. This must be why the standard recommendation is to get to the airport 2 hours(!) before your flight.
• etothepii
  Can I recommend something concrete every time something like this happens to you?1. Use ChatGPT (or similar) to make a fun and attractive greetings card image that is a farcical representation of the situation.2. Use MoonPig.com (or similar) to send it through the real/royal mail to someone important (but not the CEO) at the company that has annoyed you.This need not cost more than $6. That's almost certainly less than 1% the cost of the long haul flight that this happened on.Everything you describe is likely a function of the CFO being allowed to treat the savings they can find as if they are a profit centre. It is incumbent upon those of us that can see a better way to demonstrate that the 5p per flight that the CFO optimised annoyed some customers enough to spend real time bringing it to someone's attention.The first time I did this I effectively received over $2,000 from my airline of choice (though the path to that was convoluted). Most people don't react well to being told they are wrong. Use your intellect and industry to show them a better way in a positive and friendly way.You will usually get better results and by spreading more positivity in the world will likely feel happier too.