Airport Security - The Great Consumer Rip-Off

WHO COULD fail to be shocked by the dramatic scenes at airports across the UK last week?
After years of false alarms, security lapses and tanks in the drop-off zone, airport operators’ worst nightmare came true – millions of customers spent hours in their terminals without actually buying anything.
No longer were people popping into Perfume Gallery, Chanel or Christian Dior for impulse purchases of eau de toilette, designer sunglasses or jewel-encrusted mobile phone holsters. No longer were families succumbing to hunger pangs and spending small fortunes in Caviar World or Fortnum and Masons. Other travellers were showing remarkable stoicism and managing to negotiate the walk between terminals without buying a single quilted Barbour gilet, Hermes silk print scarf, Burberry jacket, Bulgari watch or other transit passenger’s essential between them.
The UK’s biggest airport operator is BAA. It must have gone against everything it stands for to have to carry out the Government’s new security edict and tell passengers they were no longer allowed to carry hand baggage onto planes and would therefore be unable to partake of that last minute shopping foray to Krispy Crème Donuts or Naturally Cashmere.
This, after all, is an organisation that is ostensibly an operator of airport infrastructure and all the health and safety, environmental and security issues that entails, and yet derived most of its £621 million pre-tax profit last year from its role as one of Britain’s biggest commercial landlords raking in millions in rent from 900 shop chains. It is an organisation that has brilliantly evaded its duty of care to its 144 million users annually by ensuring that using one of its airports is second only to being forced to watch re-runs of Love Island tied naked to a chair in a Beirut apartment block as one of the most unpleasant sensory experiences known to man. If not, why has it taken nearly five years for it to be jolted into putting into a place a system of security measures that we were assured would be the norm after 9/11?. As intelligence expert Philip Knightley says, the scenes from last week “revealed that we have been conned for years over our airport security”.
Ever since an al-Qa’ida nutter successfully detonated a bomb made from ingredients and liquids available from his local High Street chemist – including contact lens solution - on board a flight to the US in 1994, terrorism experts have known that a bomb in “liquid form” – the crux of last week’s upgrading of the terror alert to “critical” and the consequent prohibition of everything from paperbacks to bottles of fizzy water from flights – was a real possibility. And yet it took last week’s terror arrests, just a month short of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, to jolt BAA into action, into doing what we believed it had been doing all along.
In fact what BAA has been doing has been rather more self-serving. It has been protecting its profits, satisfying its shareholders, and making sure we all spend as much money as possible while waiting for flights. The fact is, for BAA to describe itself as “a world leader in airport security” – as it does on its website – is a bit like JK Rowling saying she enjoys s a bit of rough and the odd pint of Boddingtons.
BAA is a world leader in shopping centres. There are seven altogether – Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Southampton. They comprise more than a million square metres of retail accommodation, totalling a rental portfolio worth £2 billion. They have the unique feature of being linked by scheduled flights and having a captive audience of several million travellers forced to pass through them every week. They can boast the words “duty free” before their prices, convincing the more gullible amongst us that it’s worth buying a shedload of booze, perfume and assorted electronic gadgets because they are such bargains. In fact, by spending a few minutes surfing the web, it’s possible to find cheaper versions of just about everything on sale at BAA airports. (This week, for example, BAA websites are promoting the Casio EX-Z850 digital camera as a “summer scorcher” at the “bargain” price of £199.89 – “£80 cheaper than on the High Street”. After less than five minutes on Google, I had found it cheaper, including delivery, at eight UK stores).
Terminal 2 airside at BAA’s Heathrow shopping centre is typical of what you get with BAA. Do you want clear, coherent signage directing you to such trivial things as departure gates? You must be joking. What about somewhere to sit down and read your newspaper? Don’t be stupid. But if you want to spend your couple of hours between flights shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other lost souls trapped in this garishly-lit transit limbo being bounced between shops selling such useful things as organic soap and CK sunglasses, then welcome to nirvana.
As well as being paid rent by the 900 retailers who have shops at their seven sites, BAA also charges us, the passenger/customer, for the privilege of spending hours in their overcrowded lounges with inadequate facilities and a security screening system which, it now appears, wasn’t really thorough enough. This is in the form of the Passenger Service Charge, which is levied on the airline and passed on to their customers. It is not to be confused with airport tax or air passenger duty. Those fees go to the government. The Passenger Service Charge goes directly into BAA’s pocket. The charge varies from airport to airport, but with the aforementioned 144 million passengers – 75 per cent of the UK total - passing through BAA’s seven airports every year, it’s safe to say they’ve made enough money to pay for some kind of fool-proof, stress-free anti-terror system for a long time now. It’s just unfortunate they’ve chosen to spend it on Terminal Five at Heathrow and a whole new world of retail experiences instead.
Tony Douglas, the BAA Chief Executive who has been a regular on our TV screens recently, looks a worried man. He keeps trotting out the same old line that his company has responded to the latest terror threat admirably, but he’s convincing no-one, least of all himself. BAA’s system for screening passengers and their hand baggage has been exposed as less than comprehensive. It has been forced to introduce more effective measures five years too late, and in doing so has brought its shopping centres – sorry, airports – to the brink of meltdown. This has pissed off the airlines who contribute so handsomely to BAA’s profits with the huge amounts of landing fees they have to pay. And while all those customers – sorry, passengers - are busy transferring their hand baggage contents into their hold luggage and being subject to repeated body searches, they don’t have any time to go shopping.
But the real question isn’t about why BAA is unable to cope with the new security measures. It’s why weren’t they introduced years ago? The technology, according to Phillip Knightley and others, has been there for years.
Maybe the answer is to be found in the dramatic slump in retail takings at BAA’s seven shopping centres since last Thursday.