Entries Tagged 'Travel' ↓

Onemanbandwidth has written some funny shopping experiences in Hong Kong.

Regular readers will know that Imagethief made his first departure from Beijing’s spanking, new Terminal 3 last week. Well, close on the heels of the first departure must come the first arrival, which I made on Sunday afternoon. On the whole it was OK, but the experience left me thinking that, as so often happens in China, imposing grandeur has been emphasized over old-fashioned operational efficiency.

Here’s why I come to this conclusion. First, when we taxied up to the terminal, we couldn’t park because there was an Air China plane occupying our assigned gate at the international wing. The airport authorities would not allow us to use any of the many open gates, but decided we should wait on the tarmac with four engines spinning until the other plane departed (figures on the Internet –and the Internet is never wrong– suggest that’s about 200 liters of jet fuel a minute burning out into Beijing’s already ruined atmosphere). Our bemused pilot kept his planeload of weary passengers amused with a running patter on the situation over the PA. Eventually the controllers relented and let us pull into the empty gate right next door.

Norman Foster’s terminal design is graceful and splendid, but it’s also long. We parked near the end of Terminal 3E’s long “tail” (near the center of the three building complex), and had to walk all the way back to the far end to reach immigration. This was, to put it mildly, a hoof. There are travelators, but as anyone who lives in China knows, Chinese travelators are not exactly lickety-split. It took a while.

The great benefit of business class is that you can beat most of the plane-load to the immigration counter. This is important in Beijing, where T2’s immigration area is often undermanned, leading to queues that can reach the back of the room and then fold back on themselves (although it has got better in recent years). I had hoped that T3 would feature an overhaul of the immigration area design. No such luck. There are what seem to me like relatively few counters for the world’s biggest terminal. When our planeload arrived, only four of the ten counters for foreigners were manned, although they did open more counters after a few minutes. But most surprising was that in a terminal roughly the size of the Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein there is still not enough space for the queues. It took only two plane loads of people for the area to fill and the lines to start curling back on themselves. God knows what it will be like when the terminal is operating at capacity. Take a number and wait.

Which leads me to my last point: From the pier to the parking lot, which is in the next province over, there is still not a single bookstore. They may have them in the domestic wing (T3C), but there is zilch in international.

If I may delicately pose a question to BCIA management, WTF!?

Imagethief put the “ass” in “business class” last night, when he had the rare privilege of being able to sit at the front of the 747. While I’ve had the very occasional business class intra-Asian flight, this was only my second business class trans-Pacific flight. The last one was thirteen years ago, when I first moved to Asia, and biz class tickets for relocation was just one of many outrageous demands my partner and I made on the way to spending S$2 million and failing spectacularly. Those were the days.

Many of my friends are jaded biz-class veterans long past the state of taking its relatively petty comforts for granted. However for me a glass of champagne before takeoff is still utterly novel, so I reveled in it. The brilliant thing for the client that paid for my ticket is that for a relatively small price in the grand scheme of things, they have pretty much earned my slavish and undying loyalty.

Or at least, that’s the way it feels now. But on the plane it took about six minutes for my own sense of entitlement to start settling in. As I sprawled grotesquely in my unaccustomed legroom and watched the economy-class passengers shuffle past me, I thought to myself regally, I wonder where the little people will be sitting today?

The “little people” will include me again next time I have to pay for my own ticket so I’d probably better not let eleven hours of middlebrow luxury go to my head.

This flight was also the first opportunity I’ve had to fly from Beijing’s Terminal 3, which is so new that the last vestiges of plastic wrap are still clinging to the outside.

I’d like to pick one word to sum the overall effect of Norm Foster’s masterpiece:

Big.

I realize that’s not particularly eloquent, but, believe me, it’s the most appropriate word.

It was misty when I arrived in the early morning, and the building put on a textbook display of “looming” as it emerged into view. Looming is all the rage in Beijing architecture these days. I’m not sure I ever really understood what “to loom” meant in a truly visceral way until I was standing near the new CCTV tower recently. By near I mean two kilometers away, on the far side of Tuanjiehu. Like Mount Everest or the planet Jupiter, CCTV tower is so big that it redefines the concept of “nearness”. It’s like the Tyrell Corporation headquarters from Blade Runner, except with a hole through the middle and no flying cars (something Beijing could use). The new National Theater, also known as “The Egg”, also looms nicely. I like to stand in front of it and yell, “Gort, Klaatu barada nikto!” while Chinese tourists take pictures of me.

In the looming department, T3 gives both The Egg and CCTV tower a run for their money.

Still, despite its otherworldly scale, once inside the early signs were good. There were plenty of recognizable food brands, including the all important Starbucks for your pre-flight jolt. Crucially, while the check-in was necessarily all up front, there were separate immigration and security clearances for each terminal. It was my fastest swing ever through international exit formalities, a process that at the old T2 normally goes so slowly that you need to film it time-lapse to see any progress.

However, once I whizzed formalities I was reminded that China is still working out how to do a really world class airport terminal.

Have you ever been to Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong, or Changi in Singapore? Even after you clear immigration and security there is a never ending range of cafes, fast food brands, luxury boutiques, duty free shops, bookstores, electronics shops and heaven knows what else. It doesn’t matter if you’re flying steerage and have no lounge access, because you can simply shop the time away. That’s how you know these are major hub airports. They are spectacular at getting you to spend money.

Beijng’s T3 is not like that. Once you clear formalities you’re screwed unless you want luxury goods, Olympic souvenirs or duty free liquor. There are food choices, as long as you’re happy with either an unrecognizably-branded café that reeks of 西式餐厅 or Pizza Hut. No coffee. No electronics. Not even a candy shop. All the good stuff, such as it is, is on the “outside”, before immigration and security. In the cavernous space there is a touch of desolation about it all. The effect is rather as if someone had put a mediocre strip mall inside the Houston Astrodome.

The whole concession arrangement smacked of having been designed by someone who doesn’t actually travel by air, or who had no vision for Beijing’s potential role as a hub airport. Think about it: Most people will want to deal with the formalities before they relax and shop because on any given day they won’t know how long it will take to get through them. And international transfer passengers, if Beijing ever develops that market, won’t even know that there was something better just beyond their reach.

Even creaky T2 manages a Starbucks inside the security clearance. It also has lots of convenient vending machines where you can buy a bottle of water for RMB5 rather than stumping up RMB25 for a test-tube full of Evian at one of the cafes. That’s something that got left out of T3 as well.

But here is the strangest thing: T3 is the world’s biggest airport terminal and yet it had not one news stand or book store that I could spot. Not one. And I walked a lap. Forget the food, duty free, coffee, and all that. That’s frills. But how can you have an international terminal with no reading material whatsoever? Not even Chinese reading material?

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. There were two places you could get a newspaper: The first class lounge and the business class lounge. Apparently coach class passengers are assumed to be illiterate. I don’t know what the selection at the first class lounge was like, but at the business class lounge it was limited to six different German language newspapers (really), China Daily (the sole English offering), People’s Daily and nationalist tinderbox Global Times. Air China operates the lounge, but I have to imagine that Lufthansa, which also uses that terminal, is supplying the German newspapers.

There are, however, two bright spots. There is free WiFi, which counts for a lot, and the chairs are padded. Both of these things elevate Beijing T3 above depressing Shanghai Pudong, with its total lack of network and those brutal steel waffle chairs that cause ass gangrene if you sit in them for longer than five minutes.

You take what pleasures you can get.

But where’s the news stand?