LET me give you these scenes from two airports, from the passenger’s point of view, not the airport management’s.
Arrived at NAIA Terminal 1 at 6:50 a.m. for a 9:25 a.m. flight. It is the usual crowded and chaotic entrance. Passengers not just disembarking with luggage but some packing luggage just before entering. Porters at the ready, get in line to the entrance and voila! one is in the check-in counter line. It is approximately 7:10 a.m. and there are about four passengers in the queue. Gradually, though slowly, they show passports, get boarding passes and check-in luggage.
Comes the fifth group behind which one follows, a couple with two teenage children, one in a wheelchair, and therefore with an airport assistant and a lot of luggage. One is prepared to wait, but it takes long and longer than the usual wait. Little by little, the line behind this counter goes somewhere else, even to longer lines because they are moving faster. Twenty minutes, then another 10 minutes, and we are waiting for more than half an hour. This is a Philippine Airlines (PAL) flight, and the attendant seems flustered. She goes from desk to desk interminably and when at last she gets to the baggage tags, she cannot seem to figure out how to attach them. So, she takes longer yet. Finally, one lady passenger who has endured the wait goes up to ask what is going on. No satisfactory reply given. Another passenger follows suit and tells the attendant to ask for help to move faster. Reaction is a vague smile and “Thank you for waiting.” It was a 40-minute wait because by then it was 7:50 a.m. And not yet checked in. So, dash to the Immigration line and encounter more lines, more people and more slowness but it is not as bad as the PAL counter. There’s a Fil-Am couple just ahead of us behind the yellow line. I turn to my traveling companion and say, “This airport...” and before I can continue, the Fil-Am woman turns to me and says, “sucks.” I just smile so as not to be too derogatory of one’s airport to a by-now foreigner. But just at that moment, someone jumps the line and goes directly to the immigration officer of the Fil-Am couple who are next in line. And the immigration officer accommodates him. The Fil-Am lady turns to me with a knowing look. That was Departure from NAIA.
This was Arrival. From a PAL Airbus came a huge passenger throng composed of 75 percent foreign passport holders. The line for foreign passports was dense, crowded and slow. The Senior Citizen line composed of a multitude of wheelchairs (you see more wheelchairs in Manila airports than anywhere else) seemed paralyzed. Only the Philippine passport line is moving at a respectable pace because of much fewer Philippine passport holders. Then one notices the E-gates, all lighted up but no one using them. Could they be out of order so soon? Meanwhile, airport personnel are moving some foreign passport holders to the Philippine passport line. Yet they do not encourage anyone to use the E-gates. Finally, two intrepid ladies do use the E-gates on their own and get through. So, the gates are working, why are the airport personnel not telling passengers to use them? Outside it is the usual chaos of vehicles, baggage and welcomers. The ordeal will soon be over when one is on the way out.
At Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, which is huge with walkways, escalators, elevators and indoor airport transfer cars, there was an unbelievable crowd of passengers from flights arriving at the same time. About 90 percent were tourists speaking in a variety of tongues. It is the high season for tourism when in countries with winter, people flee to the tropics. Thailand is a prime destination. My estimate of the crowd in the lines toward Immigration would be 5,000 at a minimum. It took an hour through the lines of which there were many. While behind the yellow line at last on the right side of an Immigration booth and my turn, the smart lady waiting on the left side of the booth suddenly reversed course and took my turn at the right. She smiled, and I could only smile back. We did get to the meeting point where our car ride was waiting and worrying whether we had arrived or not. Another wait because of traffic and then we were off on expressways passing multitudes of high-rises. Bangkok is not Manila.
Departure from Bangkok via PAL brought a lot of Pinoy passengers, of course. Two Pinoy ladies who were waiting for their male companion who had not yet arrived, became impatient and lined up, reaching the check-in counter just as he arrived. They were already checked in but in full view of everyone on the line, one of them lifted the line ribbon and ushered in their latecomer companion to the check-in counter making the Indian ahead of us shake his head in disapproval. I, too, disapproved.
The VAT area that validates one’s purchases for the tax refund had four desks and no lines. Everyone was speedily dispatched. But the money was returned only after check-in so there was a substantial line there for the refund, though it moved at a decent pace. One impatient Eastern European ahead of me called his female companion from outside the line to go directly to a window cutting the line. She was turned back and required to get online.
Boarding passes and passports were checked electronically before security in very short lines of two or three, eased by the proliferation of E gates, and we were done.
All airports note the number of passengers they handle. It is their symbol of success. To the passenger, among those numbers who experiences wall-to-wall people, queue-jumping, long waits, it is a cattle run.
