Posts Tagged ‘airport’

We used Manchester Airport fast track for the first time last week. We received a discount on it with our car parking, though it is only about £4 anyway. Is it worth it? I would say that it probably is.

It’s pot luck of course. You might end up going through on a day when the regular line has no queue. Or you might find that there are long queues in both regular and fast track. In fact, it reminded me of the speedy boarding passes in Come Fly With Me.

However, on the day we went through there was a queue at the regular line, which from what I remember seems fairly standard for Manchester, whereas we got straight through. Given the cost is fairly small in relation to the wider cost of the travel, it seems like it is worth the gamble to speed the process up and reduce my stress levels.

We had lounge access included in our outboard flights to Iceland. This was my first experience with an airport lounge, so I was keen to see what it was like.

We had access to the Aspire lounge at Manchester. It was easy to find but there was some confusion on arrival. Everyone else had lounge passes, but as we had electronic tickets, we had not received any. It wasn’t clear on their system that our ticket included lounge access, but this was eventually cleared up by a senior member of staff.

The area itself was reasonably comfortable, with a variety of seats and tables. There were power sockets embedded in our table, but no view of any flight boards. The view was reasonable.

Food and drink

The food and drink is included. We ate our way through a pastry, two bowls of soup, four bags of crisps and a slice of cake. They also brought out a few sandwiches as we were leaving.

Alcohol is included, so if you are a heavy drinker you can probably reclaim your £20-30 entry fee in that.

Downsides

The wifi was awful.

The lounge has no toilets of its own, but shares communal ones. These were tiny. One of the things I like about airports is that they usually have large and airy toilets, but these were not.

The lounge was not too busy, but then neither was the airport. Assuming it scales up proportionally, I think you would find that at busy times, escaping the bustle of the airport would only bring you into the bustle of the lounge. Online reviews seem to agree.

Conclusion

If it’s included in your ticket, then it is worth taking advantage of lounge access. If not, I’m not sure. I need a bigger dataset before I can really make a recommendation.

One of the problems with the new AirPort Utility, 6.0+, is that it doesn’t have a DHCP clients table. This is obviously ridiculous, as anything claiming to be a router that can act as a DHCP server needs to have one, so I phoned AppleCare to sort it out.

They first asked me for the product’s serial number. But the problem is, this is genuinely invisible.

It’s below all those big symbols. Can you read that? I certainly can’t. No matter how close I move my face (human optics lacking a zoom function after all) and my eyesight is pretty good. Luckily, I managed to find it via AirPort Utility.

After some digging with first line, and some more with the senior I was passed through to, they eventually sorted it out for me – fair play to them as they basically spent twenty minutes talking me through how to bypass all of Apple’s security lockdowns to get the old software installed that does have the functionality.

Unfortunately by this point I had been on the call almost an hour, at a cost of £10 to myself, but they did at least solve the problem.