“Data has been sent.”
This is the very definition of ‘captive audience,’ isn’t it?
Yes. And it’s a shitty, shitty thing to do to travelers. Especially international travelers who may be looking at a 20+ hour day today. My Monday was 27 1/2 hours, door to door.
I was in Rome somewhat recently. When I landed and was leaving the airport I thought it was kind of shabby. Like they built it in 1960 and never did a thing to it since.
When I was leaving, there was a loooong wait to check-bags (talk about queuing!).
Once I got through all that mess I was in this HUGE duty free area which was really quite nice. Not shabby at all. Very modern and clean and pleasant. Fortunately you could buy food/drinks from places interspersed between the Armani and Versace stores.
Then you went down the concourse to the gates and it was much less impressive (fine but meh). Seems they spent all they had on that shopping area.
Recalculating for accuracy: it was about 25 or so hours, door to door. I managed to sleep 6ish hours on the second 13h-ish long flight, but still.
I flew out of Stansted the other day, and they intentionally set up the walking path from security to the gates as a silly curved loop through the terminal that forces you to walk past all the shops and restaurants. Here’s their terminal map to illustrate the concept:
Well, for only £8 you could have purchased a FastTrack which would have allowed you to skip the whole miserable mess (provided you found the rabbit hole by taking a left turn at Albuquerque WHSmith).
So, yeah: an enormous ripoff, not to mention a colossal waste of time even if one can resist the siren songs.
Well, I bought Colgate in Austria about a month ago.
Well, @squeegee I too hate the forced walk through the Airport Mall.
But at least Thailand has shops. Some of them (Heathrow is like this I think) make you actually wander through the shops themselves. And the paths are always winding around displays, which people stop to look at, and you have to wriggle around, which fills you with a murderous rage…
I’m inclined to agree with you on this.
I thought you were making a joke, but holy cow - you can purchase the right for £8 to not shop. What’s wrong with these people?
The website says FROM £8. I did some googling, but couldn’t find a list of add-ons and their prices.
£2 extra to not get a perfume sample in the face.
It’s probably variably priced. The service remains the same, but it gets more expensive during peak hours.
There’s a great one in the Milwaukee airport. It was a massive, disorganized book lovers’ paradise in a vintage mercantile downtown, but when they moved to the airport they cleaned up their act (and their alphabetizing:).
But it’s still the perfect spot to pick up an old (and inexpensive!) book for a trip. I love that they have plenty of small paperbacks that’ll fit in my pocket… before my last flight, I wanted a detective novel and I had my choice of over a dozen Travis McGee books!
On my recent trip to Chicago I stopped at the duty free shop at RDU (which I don’t remember ever seeing before because there was a display at the entrance of 75% off chocolates. I stocked up on 2oz blood orange dark chocolate bars, since I couldn’t pass up on getting them for $2 each.
nice I pay 4$ a piece for Lindt bars with candied orange in it
If you were flying domestically you could not have shopped at “duty free”. You could certainly have shopped at an airport retailer that had a special on chocolates. But that’s not “duty free”
I wonder how many people buy cigs there just to avoid the taxes …
The store at RDU that calls itself “duty free” says it “welcome[s] domestic and international passengers.” I don’t know how it works, or if it’s actually a duty-free store.