Left luggage/baggage storage at airports.

[randomness]

Adding to the list of facilities all major airports should have is a left luggage office. This is one of those services that in many places has been discontinued in the name of "security". Given that airports like London Gatwick and Lima Jorge Chávez have managed to keep their baggage storage offices running in the face of rather extreme terrorist threat--the ones at Gatwick have luggage scanners to make sure you're not trying to store explosives or something--I wonder about the "security" excuse.

Left luggage, showers, sleep cubicles...there are probably lots of other features I'm forgetting that would be really useful to have at an airport. I mean, aside from the basic services airports generally do provide.

Any features you'd like to see at an airport?

Comments

[awfief.livejournal.com]

Craft stores inside airport security, so if you have a 3h layover you can learn a new craft. Or any kind of skill-building thing, frankly.

Spas are nice to have, I enjoyed my 4-hour layover getting a mani/pedi in the Panama airport (It also helped that they had Big Bang Theory syndication going on the TV).

Luggage lockers, though I know those are things of the past, so you can wander around unencumbered. Same security excuse, though bus/train stations don't have problems with that (I remember a particular luggage locker in Germany that stored stuff underneath where you were and retrieved it for you, so it had more space than the lockers themselves took up).

ATMs. There are airports that don't have these! (I forget, but it was either Tegucigalpa or Guatemala City airports that didn't have ATMs. If it was Guatemala City, though, I can imagine we were told there were no ATMs if they were extremely crime-ridden......but since it was just the sedan car driver who answered our question of "where is the ATM?" I think he would have given us a straight answer.)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Conversely, I got my card ripped off from an ATM in London Heathrow. Rather: I made a withdrawal on arrival, the card was returned to me with my cash like normal, it was the only time I used it the whole trip, and I had no idea anything was amiss... until I got home and promptly discovered that someone had mysteriously used "my" card from a completely unrelated ATM elsewhere in London several days later! Luckily I was able to document that, no, I was already well out of the city by then on my return flight, and after several rounds of fraud verification paperwork, my bank refunded the withdrawal. They theorized that the original machine was compromised and the hacker(s) were producing duplicate cards. Not the sort of "crime-ridden" I had ever before thought to associate with airport ATMs....

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

And not just airport ATMs. Card skimming is happening all over.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/all-about-skimmers/ is a pointer to a series on card skimmers. You'll never want to put your card in an ATM again. :)

Or at least you'll be more diligent about covering the keypad when you key in your PIN.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

ATMs. There are airports that don't have these!

It's true! Even when there are ATMs, often they're either not working or they don't accept your card.

Georgetown, Guyana didn't have any, and Paramaribo, Suriname only had ones that either didn't work or didn't take cards from outside of Suriname.