airport

The World’s Best Airport

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I’ve never been, but I’ve heard great things about Singapore’s Changi International Airport. This Wall Street Journal piece gives some details of the perks you can expect:

The airport offers amenities found elsewhere only in airlines’ fancy lounges for premium passengers. There are comfortable areas for sleeping or watching TV, premium bars, work desks and free Internet. A nap room is about $23 for three hours; a shower can be had for $6. If you want to put your feet in a tank with tiny fish that eat dead skin, that’s $17 for 20 minutes.

The pool is free to guests of the airport’s in-transit hotels; otherwise it’s about $11 a person. A bus tour of Singapore is offered free by the airport. The tour is arranged so that passengers don’t have to clear immigration—the airport retains passports so passengers don’t run off.

Simple steps matter, like minimizing annoying announcements and honking carts and instead playing soothing music to reduce stress. Placing rival currency-exchange booths and clothing stores side-by-side stimulates competition. Touch screens in bathrooms let travelers send text messages to supervisors when toilet paper runs out, for example.

Click through the article to see a video as well.

Behind the Scenes at LAX

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A good piece in Los Angeles Times on the ins-and-outs of how LAX, the world’s seventh busiest airport, is run:

Terminals 4 and 5 are where mega-players American and Delta lease space from the Los Angeles World Airport and, by virtue of their size, run these areas as if they were their own.

Then there are Terminals 1, 2 and 3, co-ops really, where smaller airlines share what feels like a shoe box.

Annual passenger volume is still below what it was before 9/11: 61 million now, 67 million then. Yet the airport, which is celebrating 50 years of jet travel, makes more than $100 million in profit annually on fees it charges airlines to use its facilities.

It sounds like the airport is run like a governmental agency:

Open since December, the Airport Response Coordination Center, or ARCC, is the airport’s central nervous system. Operators here control the stoplights outside the terminals to regulate vehicle flow. From here, an incident desk deploys plumbers to the flood in a restroom in Terminal 2 or a leaky water fountain in Terminal 3.

In a smaller room steps away, a police officer checks hundreds of surveillance cameras that monitor entrances, checkpoints and runways. Zooms in, zooms out, tilts down, pans left. What’s he looking for? Anomalies. Anything that doesn’t make sense in the normal flow of a gigantic airport.

I’d be very interested to read profiles of other major airports, such as that of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, New York’s JFK, or Tokyo’s Narita.

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(hat tip: @matthiasrascher)