Adrie Reinders

Heathrow – Terminal 5

This time, not a restaurant or hotel but my trip to/through Terminal 5 at Heathrow. This past Friday I flew from Amsterdam to the US via London. Normally speaking when I go to London, I fly into City Airport to avoid Heathrow as waiting times there are always rather extreme. However, as I was travelling on BA to the US, I had to make a connection at Terminal 5. This terminal is brand new – and whilst it has the most amazing problems at the beginning, losing endless pieces of luggage,  you would imagine that by now it should have resolved these start-up problems by now. Half a year after it’s opening dramas – I was therefore looking forward to the efficiency and smoothness of a transfer through a newly built terminal able to tackle the issues of today’s world.

It started when I got of the plane and walked to “Connections”. The sight of an endless row of people, half-blocking a normal aisle greeted me and my fellow passengers. And these were not ALL transfer passengers, but just those that transferred through Terminal 5. All others were loaded onto buses to be taken to another terminal, the same antiquated process as at the rest of Heathrow. Whilst there were tons of personnel supposedly helping passengers through the transfer – it was still chaos with endless ropes that made you zig-zag all over the place. Customs took forever (three counters only for half the passengers, two of which were helping “problem cases” that took hours, instead of taking them aside in order to ensure that they managed the rest smoothly). Then you were sent upstairs to security, same story – endless ropes and zig-zagging and heaps of personnel “Helping”. Once through this nightmare, I wanted to get to the Lounge. This involved being sent downstairs…walk half a mile past all the shops…then only to be sent upstairs again. Makes sense.

All in all, Terminal 5 to a passenger is a logistical nightmare. They’d be better off taking a leaf out of Disney Land’s book when it comes to managing large amounts of people quickly and efficiently. An advice from the University of Indiana on Logistics would definitely not have been a waste either.

Last but not least – why do these terminals not have a special section and process for business travellers? These people generally know exactly how a security check works, and are driven to insanity by all these others that face “new” security regulations for the first time. And it would help to have biometric controls, like at Gatwick or Schiphol – again, favored by many business travellers.

To me, the whole Terminal 5 set-up is a wasted opportunity.