Karl Poe

This is not how Lennon imagined it

In short: Liverpool airport sucks and so does RyanAir.

Full story: Today I was supposed to attend the biggest internet and new media conference in the Baltic states - Login 2010, but I’m sitting at work, following its twitter feed instead. Why? Because I’ve missed my flight on Monday.

After coming back to Liverpool from Krakow on Sunday, I’ve decided not to go back to Carlisle just to come back in the morning to fly to Kaunas. So me and my better half stayed at Hampton hotel, which was amazing. Not only because the hotel is across the street from the airport, but because the room was great and the service was amazing.

Unfortunately the fact thet the hotel is so close to the airport didn’t help us much on Monday. After checking-in, we went upstairs just to find a massive queue of people. Between 6:00 and 7:30 there were around 10 flights, meaning there were over a thousand people waiting to go through security. And even though airport workers would let people who received final boarding call for their flight through, you’d still have to wait in another line by the security and they didn’t seem to care if your flight was about to leave.

We’ve arrived at the gate just to get the door shut in front of us. There were 5 of us, all with lugage. Here’s the “fun” part — the plain was on hold while they were unloading our lugage and we could actually see it! So instead of taking 2 minutes to let us on, they were waiting for around 15 minutes. Such is the RyanAir policy. It’s also their policiy not to refund you in such cases. The best they could offer was paying 100 quid each to transfer our flight two days later from Birmingham.

OK, so the reality is that it was sort of our own fault. RyanAir and other airlines do warn you to arrive to the airport 2 hours before the flight. However, it would be crazy to deny that their policies are flawed and that Liverpool airport has some serious flow management problems. Especially as I’m not the first and probably not the last to rant about it, just google it. On top of that, they are extorting people to pay for fast lane.