I wasn’t planning on blogging today. I’m not yet on vacation but I was not planning on having any down time either. I am on a trip to Pittsburg to visit Carnegie Mellon University to observe a teacher training course they are running that sounds pretty cool. But what spurred me to fire up Word and write this was an unexpected improvement at an airport.
New York’s LaGuardia airport has been around for a long time and the last several times I changed flights here it was really showing its age. What struck me the last couple of times was that the terminal had been built for a different travel age and things had been crammed in to fit modern realities. And the physical plant, everything from the faded walls to raggedy carpet to warn out chairs made one wonder if anyone cared about the place.
But what a difference when I walked into the terminal area for US Airways today. The place has obviously been recently renovated. The whole area has a modern feel that is more like a high class hotel lobby than a place to wait for a plane. The carpet is fresh, the counters are new and modern and the seating is clean and comfortable. The highlight for me though is the tables are the corners of groups of chairs. Not only are they spacious (many airport tables are tiny and useless) but they have modern lights in the center and get this power outlets. Lots of power outlets. In fact there are 8 outlets (2 in each direction) in the center of the tables. Now if you don’t fly a lot this may not mean much to you. On the other hand if you spend time in airports hoping to use your laptop while you wait for a plane and want to avoid using up your battery or need to recharge between flights you will begin to understand.
At most airport terminals you will hunt long and hard to find a power outlet. Most times your options are to sit on a floor against the wall or stretch a cord its full length so that you can sit in a chair. That long cords is just about guaranteed to trip at least one person while you wait. Only rarely will you find an outlet next to a seat and about half the time you find one it is already being used. When they renovated this terminal they obviously thought carefully about the needs of the business traveler and power is one of those needs. As I look around I see several people with laptops plugged in and one person with a phone plugged in. And all of this with no dangerous stretches of cord or people sitting uncomfortably on the floor. You have no idea how much I hope this becomes a trend.
They had one other real cool thing. They had several desk carrels each with four desks with nice office style chairs and individual power outlets. If you really wanted to seriously focus on work you could use one of those. Frankly this was an airport I usually avoided in the past that I will not consider as a higher priority option.
The only downside is that wi-fi, while present, is not free or what I think of as reasonably priced. I will pay for wi-fi if I either really need it or it is reasonably priced for the amount of time I will use it. For a two hour layover I’ll pay a few dollars but not the almost $8 they want for “a full day” or the $5 they want for 15 minutes. Someone really needs to rationalize public wi-fi pricing. A number of airports provide free wi-fi and I wish that more would. But if they really want to maximize income more reasonable pricing is the way to do it.