Anna Livia "Lounge"

For an airport that's serving approximately 20 million passengers a year the Anna Livia lounge (The Business Lounge operated by the DAA) is really a bit too small (not to mention fairly crap). It's not much larger than a large sitting room in someone's house ... seems (whenever I'm there at least) to be too small ... the selection of food (especially) and drink is pretty poor ... They don't even allow you to steal the newspapers and there are no windows.

Why can't the DAA make a better lounge (upstairs in Pier B beside the Aer Lingus Gold circle ?) - I would imagine it's a fairly profitable operation for them as they can charge visitors / airlines for usage of the lounge.

The right place for Terminal 2 ?

It seems from reading the latest plans, that if what is currently planned ever gets started it will involve the demolition / removal from use of most of Pier C, which is currently the only decent bit of the airport and was built less than 10 years ago at considerable expense. It seems more than a little bit short sighted really.

Airside Transfer at last

Finally it seems an airside transfer option has been created ... signage in the Baggage hall indicates that you should follow the blue line on the floor - towards the Pier A end of the hall - I haven't followed it yet so don't know what lies at the end of it !

Seems to only be permitted if the passengers are already through checked i.e. they already have their boarding cards for the onward connection.

Taxi Queues

Just a small rant - why is it that there seems to be a lack of "joined up thinking" managing the taxi queues

In the olden days (10+ years ago?) the queues weren't managed at all and the drivers just queued up down the arrivals road freely as far as I know.

As passenger (and taxi) numbers started to grow a queue management service was brought in operated by the Greencaps .. a taxi marshall is supposed to monitor the queue and call the taxis up from the remote holding area (behind the Great Southern Hotel) to limit the number of taxis queueing on the terminal road and ensure an adequate supply of taxis for arriving passengers.

This is all very sensible in theory but in practice there seems to be big flaws.

At still fairly quiet times you can queue for 10+ minutes for a taxi despite there being hundreds of taxis in the holding area just waiting to come up and drive you away.

The problem seems to be that the guy marshalling the taxis up from the holding area doesn't seem to monitor flight arrivals so has no idea when it's going to be busy (which shouldn't be rocket science as the busy periods are more or less the same most days)

Surely something as simple as a camera in the baggage hall might help - so the taxi marshall could see when it's getting busy a few minutes before all the passengers turn up queue.

Many times it's happened to me that i've arrived at a fairly quiet time (around 7.15pm on a weekday evening) but still had to queue for a taxi for up to 10 minutes because they were not being called up fast enough from the holding area and got caught out by a sudden (small) rush of passengers.

Not a huge deal but it's a bit annoying when you've been waiting 10 minutes unecessarily and the taxi driver has also been waiting (along with hundreds of other taxi drivers) ... a fairly silly inefficiency.

An Experiment

We'll see how this goes - just some random thoughts as a frequent user