AA Terminal 8 at JFK. It is an affront to whatever dignity is left to air travel that this thing still exists, and it’s even more aggravating when you compare it with the shiny new Terminal 9. It doesn’t compare that well with the Port Authority Bus Terminal, come to think of it. Tight, uncomfortable terminal and baggage claim, unwelcoming customs/immigration area, worn-out unkempt look, bad pedestrian-traffic management (everyone has to move cutting across the direction of everyone else to get to and from where they’re going), oddly laid out “safe zones”, …and the “food court”… you must be joking! This is the food court at one of the terminals for the world’s largest airline at JFK? (*)
Not so bad but still a pain is Delta Terminal 2 at JFK. People, it has been 30 years since the security zones were established, you’d think they’d have had time to tear out the insides and reconfigure them into something that works better. And again, a poor selection of amenities inside the zone.
(BTW: Best addition to JFK – the Air Train, hands down. Sure it’s outside the Safe Zone and you may have to expose yourself to the elements to get into some of the terminals (or enter them through the baggage claim level or a side door), but it was going to be damn near impossible otherwise. And it does get you there.)
(The defunct TWA T5 was endearing to me in a nostalgic sort of way, but I’m sure a lot of people were thinking as they connected: “note to self: do not hire architect who drops acid” :p)
(* Note: from observation, AA’s domestic gates sit in older, more beat-up concourses in PHL, Hartford[BDL], and EWR as well. Pattern?)
EWR is actually mighty fine if I only have to deal with Continental exclusively. But get inter-airline and yeah, confusion reigns. And don’t get me started on the access-road layouts by Cthulhu & Associates traffic engineering.
BTW, I’ve never had a flight to Philadelphia that did not have to wait a good, long while for them to actually dock the jetway to the plane. Heck, last March I had one flight that got there a few minutes early and had to sit around on the apron not for lack of open gates but because “nobody seems to have been expecting us”. That is NOT reassuring, but hey, what did I want, it WAS on USelessAir.
And this brings me to SJU. Good ol’ hometown only-show-in-town SJU. Luis Muñoz Marín International, and were the former Governor not dead and unable to reply he’d probably have declined the “honor”. SJU is excellent if you have a plan that allows you to blow right through it and spend the absolute minimum time actually in it. What, you say, we should stand up for the hometown team? Not if they make a point of making us look bad to visitors. Moving sidewalks/escalators that move only sometimes, baggage carrousels with the same affliction, half offline at any given point; which are equally likely to get switched around at a moment’s notice, and have two handling one commuter flight apiece while a third is handling the last 5 arriving heavies all at the same time. Handling of the actual bags in a league with Philadelphia. Terminal B’s lackadaisiacal restroom-cleanup schedule. The severely limited choice of eateries both outside and inside the safe zones and virtual absence of any other shop except for duty-free and newsstands. The badly, no, make that not-at-all organized pickup/dropoff lanes. The fact that nobody at PRPA has seemed to think of having even ONE of the concessions remain open late nights even though SJU has a not-insignificant amount of flights in and out in the very late evening and very early morning. Like I said, if you have a strategy to get-in-get-out fast, it’s great. It’s not for lingering.
Those gaps are so you can actually get off the “moving sidewalk” and get to your gate, rather than being forced to take it all the way down the length of the terminal.