Travelling through London's Heathrow Airport has never been one of life's treats and a long-mooted expansion promises an ever more complex future. Argued over for many years, the plans include a third runway, more terminal space including satellite buildings, and an eventual capacity by mid-century of 142 million passengers a year from the current 80 million.
Simon Calder, resolute travel expert at the Independent newspaper, explains in apprehensive detail here:
"Travelling through London's Heathrow Airport has never been one of life's treats"
No airport is a treat. I've never had to change aeroplane at Heathrow, but use it regularly for arrival and departure and think it's very good. Remarkably so given its size and usage. Of course it's nice to use a tiny regional airport, but then the choice of flights isn't that great. For a major airport with so many destinations, I think Heathrow does an incredibly good job and most of the other big European & North American airports could learn from it. The people a Skytrax seem to agree:
https://www.worldairportawards.com/worlds-top-100-airports-2019/
The higgledy-piggledy nature of Heathrow had been intractable to sort out, but a lot has already happened to improve this. The concept of putting the terminal buildings in the centre, and the runways to the outside made a degree of sense in the early planning days of the 1950s, but the constraint this placed had resulted in the present configuration with effectively three separate airport passengers complexes (T2/3, T4 and T5) sharing the same runways etc. Many other places solved this by starting again somewhere else.
The long-term aspiration is a streamlined 'toast-rack' arrangement of a series of gate buildings with processing terminals at either end, and in effect the current T2 and T5 are the ends of this rack. However, by the time this might be completed, with at least T3 being swept away (and the old T1) T5 will be pretty old in itself.
Their link for Connections is excellent. Just put in the numbers of both of your flights and it leads you to exact directions, no surprises.
All of our European travels begin with a flight to LHR due to availability of daytime flights. We try to fly in to Terminal 5 and stay at Sofitel LHR.
Heathrow is my airport of choice for European transfers or a termination point. I just limit my self, mostly, to coming in and out of the same terminal, terminal 5. I find it to be a breeze, because I know it so well and I manage my flights. I don't take the cheapest flights, I take the flights I want, which will hopefully be competitive.
I like Heathrow, at least T5, probably because it's the airport I have the most experience of. I find T5 to be very easy to navigate, security is usually fast and seamless, a decent choice of shops and places to eat and a good selection of lounges although T3 has a better variety.
I don’t know if they have a pricing policy in effect, but I’ve noticed the prices for food and drink are similar to central London. There’s a few USA airports that could learn from that.
I really haven’t bought things from the shops so I don’t know what their pricing is like.
No airport is a treat.
I disagree. MCI is a treat. MCI is the Kansas City, MO airport and it's ideal because it is so compact. No endless walking. LOVE IT. I don't travel there often but when I do, there is no stress.
I've always had good experiences at Heathrow, arriving and departing. It's all T3 in my case. For awhile flights from here to London were to/from Gatwick. I was afraid I'd hate LHR when that changed, but I've been pleasantly surprised.
I don’t know if they have a pricing policy in effect, but I’ve noticed
the prices for food and drink are similar to central London. There’s a
few USA airports that could learn from that.
I agree. FYI, DEN has a "street plus 10%" pricing policy for their concessionaires. I suppose other US airports do too but I'm not sure. I've sometimes wondered how or if the policy is enforced and how they set the street price. But I rarely buy anything there beyond some food in the eateries, and bottled water in the shops. Now that they have those convenient water bottle spouts at the water fountains I try to remember to bring an empty water bottle from home and skip buying water at all.
