In January some bad reviews of Gatwick airport by American travellers went viral. One angrily asked whether the UK’s second-biggest airport was “an airport or a mall?”, another denounced it as “too big”, but the real insult was calling it a “makeshift Lego house”.
And . . . this is a bad thing? I’d much rather fly from a Lego house than an upside-down fridge (Stansted), a labyrinth that’s inaccessible from almost everywhere (Heathrow) or the modular hellscape that is Luton. This Lego house is my favourite airport, and I won’t hear another word about it.
This weekend, after two long years, Gatwick reopens the other half of its airport, which has been languishing since the start of the pandemic. The south terminal — the one with the station — means the airport is almost back to a normal operation, and not a moment too soon. Big things are happening: from next week it will host a third of the airport’s flights; the budget favourite easyJet is building up to its biggest capacity yet this summer, with 120 routes; and airlines such as British Airways, Wizz Air, Norwegian, Vueling and the Singapore-based low-cost carrier Scoot are returning to their rightful homes. See? Even Gatwick’s airlines have fun names!
My love for Gatwick goes beyond pure airline nomenclature. For starters it’s compact. There are only two terminals, the south one mere steps from the train station. (Compare this to being spat out at Terminals 1-3 at Heathrow and having to walk the length of west London to check in.) On the subject of the train: it’s cheap. The fare from central London is from £12.50 — hardly eye-watering — and the best thing is that it runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can even use contactless to pay, like you would in, ahem, a proper London airport.
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Then there’s the location. Gatwick is the most quintessentially English of the airports. Land early morning from a red-eye and you’ll float down among the Turnerian misty fields, lazy vineyards and luxe country-house hotels of mid-Sussex, which couldn’t be further from the suburban grey roofs and garden trampolines you get on a descent to Heathrow. From Gatwick you can swap meadows for metropolis in just 30 minutes — or, going the other way, Britain’s best kiss-me-quick beach in Brighton. I can be at Gatwick in an hour flat from my southeast London home; I’ve flown to Spain quicker than some journeys to Heathrow, despite it being just 18 miles away.
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It sounds slightly tragic, but Gatwick has been the backdrop for plenty of flashbulb memories over the years. It was from here that I first left Europe (to New York, on the now-defunct Continental Airlines); took my baby son for his first holiday (to Athens); and landed after a four-year stint in Hong Kong, scrambling around for a pound coin for the luggage trolley.
I told friends I was engaged over breakfast prosecco at the Wetherspoons (the peerless Red Lion) before an early morning flight to Budapest; and it was in the Virgin Atlantic lounge that I got the breaking-news alert that the Love Island supercouple Jack and Dani had broken up. My heartbreak was nursed with a margarita on the roof terrace overlooking the runway.
More recently it’s where I was, at the crack of dawn, on the day last May that travel for leisure became legal again in England. Gatwick’s north terminal was humming with a handful of itchy-footed passengers off to a slim selection of destinations, including Portugal, Madeira and Gibraltar, all marvelling like newborns at ordinary airport things such as boarding passes, plastic bags for liquids and luggage trolleys. That, and then the ghoulish emptiness of departures, broke my heart a bit.
Of course Gatwick isn’t perfect. I could do without the sinuous crawl through duty-free; there’s never anywhere to fill your water bottle; and somehow my gate is always flung off in that satellite terminal, miles from the departure lounge.
That’s the thing about love, though. You can accept the flaws.
Gatwick reopens — but what has changed?
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by Rhys Jones
Pre-Covid, Gatwick was Britain’s second-busiest airport, with almost double the number of passengers of either Stansted or Manchester. But its footfall of 46 million in 2019 shrank to just 6.3 million last year, which led to its south terminal being mothballed.
Bringing that 64-year-old terminal back on stream is an essential part of a plan for it to reach 60 per cent of 2019 capacity by the end of this year. Doors reopen this Sunday, with daily flights at the airport increasing from about 350 to more than 600, with expected peaks of 900 this summer. As one airport executive put it, the reopening is “the equivalent of opening Luton airport overnight”.
Once fully up and running, the south terminal will handle a third of Gatwick’s flights. In preparation for its reopening there’s been a maintenance blitz: 4,500 floor tiles and 3,000 light fittings replaced; 800-plus flight-information screens checked and serviced.
But what’s changed beyond the cosmetic? Last year Gatwick introduced a £5 drop-off fee for passengers arriving by car (exemptions for blue badge holders). They can still be dropped off in the long-stay car parks and take a free shuttle bus to the terminal.
In line with the relaxation of Covid protocols in England, the wearing of facemasks is no longer a legal requirement inside the airport, although Gatwick still recommends it. Depending on your airline and destination, you may still have to wear one on your flight, so it’s worth checking in advance and taking one with you.
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Expect a few airline changes too. Some carriers have gone bust, others expanded. EasyJet and British Airways (BA), two of Gatwick’s main tenants, will be back. The former is hoping for a big rebound and, with characteristic gusto, is promising its biggest summer season ever, with flights to 120 destinations.
BA is taking a more measured approach and is adding back capacity slowly, in part because it has spun out its Gatwick operations under a new subsidiary, BA Euroflyer. It will operate 35 short-haul routes this summer, down from 47 in 2019, with the first flight taking off on Tuesday.
BA suspended its Gatwick operations at the beginning of the pandemic and retrenched at Heathrow. It was initially unclear whether the airline would abandon its secondary London hub altogether, as Virgin Atlantic has done.
Yet, Gatwick is too vital an airport for BA to abandon. For one, Heathrow operates at 99 per cent capacity and doesn’t have the space to accommodate BA’s Gatwick flights. But the airline also needs to defend itself against its rivals. According to Robert Burgess, editor of the frequent-flyer website headforpoints.com, “it is simply too dangerous strategically to let the low-cost carriers control Gatwick”.
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“There is a large catchment area of people for whom Gatwick is convenient and whom BA wants to attract,” he says. “BA is very nervous about giving the low-cost airlines free rein, and doesn’t want to force customers in south London into the arms of easyJet and Wizz Air in case they find out they prefer it.”
The Euroflyer initiative is BA’s attempt to create a sustainable airline that can turn a profit — something that evaded the airline even in 2019, its busiest year. Staffing contracts are cheaper than at Heathrow, with the maximum achievable annual salary for cabin crew at Gatwick pegged at £24,000 (cabin managers at Heathrow can earn up to £39,000).
Will “budget BA” be a success? “Most frequent flyers are unlikely to notice a difference,” Burgess says. “BA has been very careful to state that to the passenger Euroflyer will be identical to its mainline operations at Heathrow.” This means that BA status-card holders will receive the same benefits they get at Heathrow, including access to lounges and Avios reward points, while economy flyers get a better free luggage allowance than they would with easyJet and Wizz Air. “It’s the staff that will bear the brunt of the cost-saving measures,” Burgess says.
Norwegian, which operated more than ten low-cost long-haul routes from Gatwick pre-Covid, will be back only as a short-haul airline, shuttling passengers to Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki. But it could be replaced by Norse Atlantic, a new airline launched by the former founder of Norwegian that is intent on resurrecting its long-haul network. Norse has secured a number of landing slots and is hoping to launch cheap flights to the US in June with a 15-strong fleet of ex-Norwegian Boeing Dreamliners.
Other challenges for Gatwick centre around staffing. The airport let go more than 1,500 staff in 2020 and 2021 — about 45 per cent of its workforce to weather the pandemic, and getting all those personnel back won’t be easy. Gatwick has 400 vacancies at present, and there are a further 5,000 across the whole airport, including catering companies, baggage handlers and other support staff.
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Like other sectors, the travel industry is struggling to recruit quickly enough. A lot of those who were made redundant have found permanent jobs elsewhere, while those who remained are fighting for better pay and conditions. That’s a challenge for the airport, which will need more workers to keep its expanded operations running smoothly.
Gatwick will be keen to avoid the recent scenes of chaos seen at other airports, including Heathrow and Manchester, where a lack of immigration staff and baggage handlers meant that thousands faced long queues at passport control and were unable to collect their luggage.
The fully reopened Gatwick will be desperate to make a good first impression with returning travellers, many of whom won’t have flown for two years. Whether it can achieve this remains to be seen.
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