JC L

Review of BAA London Stansted

Fly from somewhere else (particularly if you have ...

Fly from somewhere else (particularly if you have young children)!

This has to be the worse airport I've flown from. Long security queues (even early in the morning), not enough seating in the departure lounge and excessive "meandering" through airport shops with hand luggage and tired children to get to a train to take you to your gate. There are steps and escalators all over the place.

At Security:
Long queues as mentioned, with a pushchair you are sent off to a different queue but only when you've already queued for 30+ minutes. They scan all baby milk/water etc so this takes time too.

Also note there is fast track security where you can pay for the privilege of being searched! Which of course means there's no incentive for the airport to improve the ridiculous queues for the rest of us plebs.. and when you read the small print... "Not suitable for passengers travelling with baby paraphernalia" of course not!! That would slow the money making down.

At the gate:

Steps down, which you are forced to queue on. No mention of this from ground crew who can see you have a pushchair, bags and two small children. No help offered. Then you get out onto the runway, have to fold said pushchair whilst people push past you to queue up the steps... Half way up the steps holding a baby and carrying a bag with the guy behind annoyingly trying to push you forwards a member of the cabin crew helps carry the bag up the last few steep steps.

We won't talk about the flight, that is a different review.

Returning to the airport 8 days later:

This time rather than straight up steps you are sent on a long walk that includes going up and down escalators and then up some more... Last one there was a lift but that also involved an extended walk.

Then we got to passport control. Well, there are miles of barriers even though there were only people in a third of them which meant you have to walk 5 times further than necessary. No queuing for the electronic passport gates, but of course no one under 12 can use those so those of us with small children have to queue... Yes that's right, there were about 20 people for non EU every and several hundred of us in the other queue all with small children.



Car parking:
We paid for meet and greet, which is an oxymoron since you aren't met or greeted. But at least it was close to the terminal and the difference in price between that and one with a bus transfer... Well let's just say with 2 small kids, 3 large cases, 4 pieces of hand luggage, 2 car seats and a pushchair... Well the maths didn't add up so meet and greet it was. We had to queue into the airport, it turns out this was something to do with drop off but since the roads close are only single lane it causes tail backs even at 6am. We had to queue to get into parking area and also when we returned we had to queue for 10/15 minutes to collect the key.

All in all, I'm not going back. The airport is not interested in the passenger experience and on the whole the staff we encountered were not particularly polite nor helpful.

Fly from elsewhere.