What bugs me about airports - and it's airports everywhere, with Australian examples no better or worse than elsewhere - is the "friction" imposed between airliner and home.
You know what I mean. It's the hour or so between walking out the door and getting onto the plane. Sometimes it's three hours, sometimes it's less than an hour, but it's packed with interactions of various sorts, queues, delays, transactions and expenses.
Even for an elite flyer with a priority checkin and lounge access, it's far from smooth progress. The same credentials and information have to be checked several times by various agencies. Boarding passes, government ID, airline loyalty cards, baggage tags, passports; if it was a website needing all this information to be repeatedly re-entered, nobody would use it!
Then there's the expense. Admittedly less for a Gold or Platinum flyer using free wifi in the lounge while sipping a free cappuccino and reading a free newspaper, but just how "free" is all that comfort? Typically it takes thousands of dollars to get to that level where the goodies are complimentary. Again, if the lounge lizards had to pay $200 for each lounge entry, they wouldn't. They would use the cafes outside.
But who likes airport dining? Typically the food is bland or poor quality, the prices are inflated and the service spotty. Where there are limited food and drink options available, the operators take every opportunity to gouge their captive audiences. And that goes for just about every commercial service offered, from parking to paperbacks. Prices ALL have a surcharge of some sort. If all this stuff was available on websites - and it is - then people would shop on websites.
Apart from parking and sandwiches, I guess. You can bring your own snacks, so long as you don't smuggle juice through security, but you are stuck with the transport options allowed or controlled by the airport. Long gone are the days at Canberra airport where you could park for free outside the terminal door. Even collecting an arriving passenger in your own car is deliberately made difficult, with police chasing private cars away from the arrivals level, and the free ten minute parking zone is a six minute walk from the baggage carousels. Sydney airport offers train service to and from the terminals, but the ticket prices are well above those for suburban stations either side on the same line.
And don't get me started on the security checks. The best I can say is that Australia makes it a less painful process than the USA.
And why is there all this nonsense anyway? Board a ferryboat or an interstate bus, and nobody demands you take everything out of your pockets and send your backpack through a scanner. If a terrorist wants a crowd of hundreds of people, they are readily found in shopping malls, cinemas, parks. Or in the long queues for check in and security before anybody official has even thought about checking for weapons.
As a frequent flyer, I like flying. I don't like everything that comes before and after my flight, when I feel like an impersonal world with a plastic smile is grabbing everything they can get out of my wallet while also stealing my time in a series of industrially carpet-tiled spaces.
Do I really want to spend a significant part of my life in such uncomfortable and expensive places?
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