Speaking of usability, those automatic check-in machines could do with a redesign. Supposedly meant to reduce lines at check-in counters, a quick informal survey among friends, family and acquaintances finds that no-one uses them. The reason? Either they find them "confusing" (this from people who also find many web sites confusing) or they have had negative experiences, the worst one being completing the whole check-in process only for the machine to crash just before it has spit out the boarding pass. Result: you still have to go queue and have wasted time both doing something for nothing and because while you were doing this, other people joined the queue which is now much longer than when you arrived...
As far as the third runway and increasing the number of flights goes, the potential extra 220,000 flights will be good neither for the hundreds of thousands of people who live under the flight path (think noise overhead from 4 am to midnight), nor for the millions of passengers already confused by the five terminals, the warren-like quality of the endless corridors, the complexity of navigating from one terminal to the next when switching flights, the potential for delays due to increased flights (the domino theory applied to take-off and landing slots) and for luggage misplaced or lost during transfer (think fiasco at the opening of Terminal 5) - one could go on.
I can't think of a particularly "user-friendly" airport, to be honest, but Heathrow probably ranks up near the top of the list for worst airport experiences as a user.
What is your favourite airport and why?
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