Re: Leeds Bradford - Passengers & Frequent Flyers
Trouble is with passenger comments is that they are very subjective. Some people have high expectations, often when they have paid the lowest fares, and others are more realistic in their appraisals.
I sometimes look at passenger websites such as Skytrax and the below posted comments about LBA from that site are typical of what I mean.
The first castigates LBA and awards one star (I am surprised they were that generous in view of what they said) and the second awards the full five stars.
I glance at other airport reports reveals the same wide divergence of views.
[textarea]In the past LBA had all the virtues of a small airport, for which the odd limitation was an acceptable trade-off. Now it's just another miserable big airport in miniature - all of the bad bits, with none of the good bits.
As other posters have noted the drop-off experience is ghastly and the £1 baggage trolley charge is crass.
The former long stay car parking has suddenly been chopped in two. They made the half that's nearest the terminal into short stay. This bit is naturally deserted, since LBA has almost zero business/short haul traffic. So you now walk miles across this empty car park before reaching the long stay somewhere near Horsforth. From here, your long walk uphill back to the terminal is compounded by all the old entry doors being permanently locked since they now placed the main entrance at the far end of the terminal. Once inside, of course they make you double back, since security is back in the direction you came from. A good work out for such a tiny airport. Baggage handling can be lame.
On my inbound flight, when the bags emerged on the carousel they were from the wrong flight. Pax noted this, staff did nothing. So staff were alerted who immediately went on the defensive and refused to help, "we don't know any more than you do" etc. So we all stood and watched the same bags go round for maybe 20 minutes with no-one taking anything off. Because no bags were claimed, there was no room to load any more of the right bags. So they just kept going round and round. Staff refused to take them off, bizarrely insisting "please remove your bag so wecan make more space". Hey, they're the wrong bags, we kept telling them. "Don't get shirty with me it's not our fault" etc.
Meantime the other side of the curtain, 4 baggage handlers sat around doing nothing with full carts that they could not load - stalemate. Eventually enterprising pax started pulling off the wrong bags manually to make the odd bit of space. At which point ground staff suddenly decide to confuse everyone by announcing "if your bag has not arrived, please come and fill in a form". So now more mayhem as the pax try to ascertain, "did they not even load the bags at all?" Reply - "we don't know any more than you etc"
Meantime the odd correct bag suddenly starts appearing, one at a time, in the gaps created by the enterprising pax. An hour later, eventually everyone got their bag, one by one. By the way, this was the only inbound flight in an otherwise deserted baggage hall. It really defies belief. Well done guys, you messed up the nice little airport that was LBA.[/textarea]
Excellent check in - literally two minutes. Food hall ok, although limited choice. Security was quick and departure hall was clean and not overly busy - although it can be very busy Friday/Saturday. Arrival was quick - there was a queue at immigration but all desks were open and we queued for no more than five minutes. The baggage reclaim area was a breeze and no queue for baggage. I used the short stay car park - whilst its fairly expensive it is in front of the terminal and very convenient.
http://www.airlinequality.com/Airports/ ... um/lba.htm
