Synopsis of Airports in London and New York

I'm going to focus on the main airports of each city as there are countless other airports around London and New York which don't carry nearly as many passengers. New York is served by John F Kennedy (approx. 46 million passengers 2009), La Guardia (approx. 23 million passengers 2008) and Newark Liberty (approx. 35.4 million passengers 2008). London is served by Heathrow (66 million passengers 2009) , Gatwick (32,5 million passengers 2009), Stansted (20 million passengers 2009) and London City to a lesser degree (2.8 million passengers 2009) although it's quite important for business travellers. So roughly 104.4 million passengers passing through New York's airports and 121.3 million through London.

Heathrow is clearly the biggest of these airports, the busiest international airport in the world, although plans to build a third runway have recently been scrapped. Heathrow will probably continue to deliver regular delays as long as it does not

have enough runway space. In terms of customer experience, Heathrow has five terminals, each of which are completely different from terminal 1, which is very dated, to terminal 5 which opened in 2008, cost £4.2bn to build and comprises the largest free standing building in the UK, so it's very difficult to give the airport an overall rating. I love the new terminal 5 as access from the M25 is very easy and for such a big terminal car to airside is very quick. Terminal 5 would seem to be paying off for the British Airports Authority (BAA) who said it recorded it's busiest ever month in July with 6.7 million passengers in the month which was a 3.5% increase from July 2009.

New York's La Guardia delivers a very chaotic experience to passengers with a lot of overcrowding. La Guardia, according to one Port Authority official, is so outdated it needs to be torn down. The travel experience here worsened post 9/11 with tighter security but the most exciting development with these airports since Heathrow's Terminal 5 was announced last week

by Delta Airlines, the Port Authority and JFK with plans for the enhancement and expansion of terminal 4. The project is going to cost $1.2bn and will help transform JFK into one of the most state of the art airports inthe US. At the moment Delta operates predominently out of terminal 2 for domestic flights and terminal 3 for international. The expansion of terminal 4 will replace outdated terminal 3 facilities and there will also be upgrading the inter-terminal connectors between terminals 2 and 4 as well as dual taxiways.

http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=43&item=1095

The first airport I ever went through in the US was Newark airport. It was a long time ago and I still remember how rude I found the staff to be there. I have read a lot of customer reviews on Newark airport and staff rudeness is probably the most frequent complaint from users. In nearly 15 years, this place hasn't changed! Customer non-service aside, Newark is another ageing airport albeit still kept fairly clean.

In contrast to Heathrow's increase in passenger numbers in July, Gatwick, which was sold to Global Infrastructure Partners for £1.5bn this year, fell by 3.1% for the year on year month of July. However, just like Heathrow, a further runway was ruled out to increase volumes due to the high cost of a planning application, thought to be somewhere between £100m and £200million. GIP's preference for increasing the existing runways capacity is to request an increase in the number of permitted take offs and landings. Stansted completes the hat trick of London airports with abandoned plans for a further runway in the face of campaigns against development. Stansted is a major European hub for low cost airlines to holiday destinations.

In terms of the whole experience, there is no airport in London or New York that is really delightful. Both cities have grown organically and all airports have been yanked along with their legs trying to play catch up with the growth in passenger numbers in and out of each city. The net result is that London and New York have airports that are there to serve the purpose and although JFK and Heathrow have big ideas, they are all a long way behind the likes of Frankfurt and Hong Kong.