| > I don't want to carry 4 big bags in the train when I travel international Japan has this really cool service where you can get your bags picked up from your hotel room and taken to the airport or from the airport to your hotel room. It costs max around $20 USD. > I don't want to travel 30 miles if my plane get cancelled. My local airport (Sea-tac) is almost 30 miles from Seattle. It can easily take an hour driving to get there. I do agree that taking lots of luggage onto the light rail (WHICH DOESN'T DROP YOU OFF IN THE AIRPORT!!) is a bad idea. But I am one of those people who despises checked luggage, since it can add another 30+ minutes to checking in. Compared to carry-on and TSA pre-check, where I can walk into the airport, through security, and be at my boarding gate in under 10 minutes. But hey, Seattle is, as much as I love it, not a world class American city. Let's try NYC. It can take over an hour to get from midtown Manhattan to JFK driving. It also takes over an hour on the subway. Oops, another bad example. You know what, I am starting to think flying out of Boston Logan[1] is pretty nice. But seriously, if you want a huge international airport, you need a lot of land, and you don't want to put that smack dab in the middle of a city, unless the land got paid for long ago, and even then, you'll be stuck with an airport that you cannot expand. Meanwhile a train from Tokyo to Narita Airport is under 20 minutes. [1] I legit like flying out of Boston Logan, the big dig was expensive but wow was it effective. Also shout out to Bogota Colombia for having super clean streets around its airport. It was an amazing second impression flying in (the first impression being how beautiful the city is from the sky!) |
As a counter to that, I did 3 weeks around the world, planes every other day, international every 4 days or so. Not a single customs, baggage, check in, transport problem until getting back home to good ol' logan airport.
The "passport validation" line was somehow over 1.5 hour. Only two international planes coming into this terminal the entire time, and they legit reformed the line like three times for some reason????
That cascaded into missing our bus back to new hampshire, which cascaded into being late for a work commitment.
Wasn't that big a deal but was very funny.