Dear people who work at the airport
I would like you to know that we passengers are trying our best.
To you, this place makes sense -- you come here every day. You speak the lingo. You know what is meant by a gate and a concourse, and the difference between a ticket and a boarding pass. 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 difficult. It's just that she has never flown before, she's trying to keep track of where all her grandchildren are, and when you mumblingly announced that "We would now like to invite our Elite SkyFlyer Gold Members to commence boarding", English being her fourth language, all she really heard was "hurble flurble durble BOARDING", and she naturally thought it might be time to board.
She was anxious, because you instilled a sense of panic in her. There is the constant suggestion that if we put one foot wrong, you will publicly shame and humiliate us, like the time you laughed at all the people who volunteered to check in our cabin bags like you asked us to. We were trying do the right thing, and we weren't to know that the bags we were planning to take with us in the cabin were not "cabin bags" as you understand them.
You give us contradictory instructions in different mediums; the monitors that you spent so much money to install show the inscrutable phrase NOW BOARDING -- REMAIN SEATED. You do everything you can to discourage us from getting on the airplane in the wrong order, but as soon as our boarding group is finally called, you immediately switch the screens to read GATE CLOSING in red flashing type.
It is not our fault that someone designed this hellscape like a giant mall intersected at right angles with a concrete dungeon. One minute, smiling salespeople are spraying expensive perfume in your face and trying to sell you a handbag that costs more than a year's salary. The next, po-faced military-looking types are barking commands at you.
Take your laptop out! Put it back in your bag! Wait your turn, don't try to jump the queue! Don't just stand there, you're holding everyone up!
At Heathrow, you tell us to go to the B gates, but there is no sign for that; there is only a sign for gate B32 to B48. Should I follow those? What if there is a gate B31 that I should be heading to, but there is a "security check", meaning that a member of staff vaguely wanders about the little train that you weirdly insist on calling a "transit"? Clearly it can't be anything serious because it happens so often that you've gone to the trouble of preparing a little animation to be shown on the screens, but it does seem to take a while, and if I go the wrong way now I may not make it back in time.
When we try to find gate B45, we encounter the following sign:
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.
I expected that after a few dozen mostly intercontinental flights I would be better at this, but hundreds of thousands of miles later I still only have the vaguest idea of what a transfer desk is for.
If you are currently designing an airport and you have a little niggling doubt at the back of your head that you haven't quite done all you could do to optimise the passenger experience, feel free to give me a call. I would be delighted to offer a free consultation to look at things from the point of view of an exhausted, anxious person out of their element, like a sort of Temple Grandin of the terminal.