London Gatwick Airport

Nothing wrong with the new ownership and the money that is being spent on it but at 0500 onwards in the North Terminal Easyjets continuing announcements about what will happen if you are not at the gate in the next three minutes is enough to drive you to despair. How come no one else has to overuse the system so much - really ruins the experience.

Arrived LGW North Terminal lunchtime. Customs was a breeze. Baggage on carousel as we had cleared Customs. Had an evening flight to catch from South Terminal but check in for flight only open 2.5 hours prior to departure. Went up to Gatwick Village expecting shops restaurants etc as there used to be in the good old days. Only Cafe Nero and Boots! Had to sit on very hard seats outside Cafe Nero for nearly four hours! Why can't Gatwick authorities realise not everyone can go through airside.

Late arrival from Spain - no one to meet plane at gate so had to wait 10 minutes for airbridge to be deployed. 10 minute trek through airport to wait at immigration. Fairly quick through passport control and brought to grinding halt due to build up of people waiting for baggage belts to be announced. After 20 minutes we are asked to move to baggage hall due to overcrowding and another 20 minutes before any baggage arrives. All in all about 1 hour 20 from landing to leaving the airport.

South terminal to IOM and back. Longish queues at security caused partly by insufficient staff to remove empty containers from the xray belt thus holding everything up. Decent range of retail outlets although generally overpriced. Long queue stretching out of the ladies toilets! Seating at a premium due to lots of people laid out asleep. Straightforward arrival on return as you would expect for domestic arrival. Overall a pretty average experience this really is a bucket and spade type airport and the new owners have a lot of work to do.

I have been using Gatwick Airport since 1963. During that time I have seen it change from a pleasant and small airport used primarily by charter airlines into the nightmare that it is today. During the 1980's I would regularly leave a Scottish airport on time only to spend an hour or so circling over Gatwick due to congestion on the one runway. Departing from the airport today it is obvious that enormous sums of money have been invested into the shopping mall that you are faced with following the security bottle-neck. On arrival however it is a very different matter an assault course is the first welcome to the incoming passenger who is then faced with passport controls that operate in a building site that seems to have remained in the same state for about 10-years floors walls and ceilings all in a state of mess as is the baggage collection area that is designed to create a bottle-neck of passengers blocking the flow from many flights who are trying to find where their baggage will be dumped. A special innovation nowadays is the need for passengers to be in possession of either a euro or one-pound coin for use of a baggage trolley specially helpful for anyone arriving from outside the EC.

A huge hall is only for Easyjet check-in and all passengers for all EZY flights are on a single vast queue. This is check-in hell. There are no take-away food shops to buy something to take onto a flight either before security or after only expensive restaurants - and who has the time to sit down for a meal when rushing to a plane because it took over an hour to clear security? Staff are bullish and rude but they are obviously working under extreme stress. Traveling through Gatwick is the perfect way to ruin your holiday even before its begun.

This is a review of South Terminal and even allowing for the ash problem it was quiet for late April especially outbound. Security staff having a shouted personal conversation at a nearby screening station and to my inexpert eye not concentrating on the job in hand. In complete contrast the operative who fed my hand baggage through the x-ray machine I used was a model of hard work and politeness. An inbound blot is the rebuilding of the passport control area the actual arrival process despite plenty of passengers was fine and fast so thumbs up to the Border Control folks but the environment (for them as well as us) is an utter mess. Overall South Terminal has been tidied up somewhat but please get rid of the car raffles and sundry promotional activities so that people can move around unhindered. So - getting better but quite a way to go yet especially if traffic picks up.

Arrived into the South Terminal with BA and departed from North Terminal with Aer Lingus. By far the most depressing airport terminals I have ever visited. The long boarding piers at the airport could be a plane watchers dream and a free way to keep kiddies transfixed/ quiet - but LGW decides to make minimum use of windows denying passengers of any views of the apron and parked airliners and virtually no natural light. Catering and shopping everywhere but no distraction available other than retail. LGW looks like a dated out of town shopping centre. Long walks with nothing interesting to see (except faded carpet and out of service slot machines) make for a confusing and demoralising terminal layout. Staff in all areas of the airport roughly spoken and profoundly unhelpful. And what is with the weird complicated closed gate boarding system - the mind boggles. I hate LGW and will avoid using that airport at all costs.

Flew out from the North Terminal on a Sunday morning. Car meet and greet worked perfectly and queues at Check-in were small. There were helpers on hand at security to guide you to the shortest queue ensure that we had the correct items out ready for inspection and advising that we needed to remove our shoes which worked very well and we were through security in under five minutes. Good range of shops with some reasonable prices clean toilets good facilities for changing infants and plenty of places to sit. On the way to the gate we had to go through another security checkpoint (as we were flying to the US) with full bag searches and body pat downs but this was handled efficiently. On the way back a 10 minute queue at passport control and our bags were coming off the carousel as we got to the baggage claim. We were in the car an hour after landing which for a larger airport I thought was pretty good.

I use Gatwick at least twice a month and my experience in January can only be described as disaster. Arrived from Prague on a late night easyjet flight landed at around 2250 at the South Terminal the same day when the UK security level was raised to severe. When we disembarked the plane we realized that the door between the jetty and the terminal was closed and there was no one inside the airport. We then managed to ask the flight attendant to help and managed the first door. Then we realized there was another second door locked. Again no sign of any staff at Gatwick. The flight attendant had to open the door again and here we are at the departure lounge rather than the arrivals. Then all the passengers wander around the almost empty airport without being approached or questioned. Eventually I managed to get the attention from a security personnel and he directed all the passengers though the arrival hall. No explanation whatsoever. They blamed easyjet of course. I have written to Gatwick airport but no response at all. It is ridiculous that they operate the airport link the jetty to the airplane and then when something went wrong they said it wasn't their responsibility. It's a shame because departure from this airport is always smooth.