Ground Floor: When I started out in my working life, people who had to travel for business were regarded as having the more glamorous end of the stick. All of us who were stuck at our desks would mutter enviously at the sight of someone setting off to exotic financial destinations like Frankfurt or Geneva and wishing that we were them.
Once I started doing business travel myself, I quickly realised that meeting overseas clients wasn't really the glamour gig at all, despite the occasional business class ticket. And since companies have become ever more cost conscious and started using the cheapest flight options available, most of my business friends groan any time they have to go abroad. There are some good trips, but most are exhausting beyond belief.
Which is why it's nice when the airport has some decent facilities.
Nowadays, I pop through Dublin Airport about once a month. I usually compare it favourably with Heathrow - which is an unmitigated hell hole - and unfavourably with almost everywhere else. But two things have improved matters over the past year.
The first, self-check-in, has nothing to do with the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA). It is the greatest use of technology for travellers since booking your flight over the internet, and if you're not checking in bags, it makes the entire experience almost pleasurable.
It certainly renders it a lot less stressful than queuing behind the family from hell and their best friends. (I don't understand what it is about people in the check-in queues. I'm sure most of them are normal but they turn into monsters once they have a ticket and a few bags, what with the queue-skipping and the long conversations with the person behind the desk. What are they talking about?)
Anyway, that goes blissfully by the wayside with self-check-in, which saves you at least half-an-hour each trip. That means once you've passed through the passenger screening area and put your shoes back on, you can go and have something to eat, which, since the beginning of September, is not the misery-filled experience it used to be. That's because the DAA has coralled the food hall, Nude, the brasserie and bar locations and moved them airside. According to airport director Robert Hilliard, this is due to customer feedback. I am one of those customers.
One day earlier this year, I flipped at the appalling non-choice of food and drink and I filled in a comment form in such a rage that the pen nearly went through the page. I know that it wasn't just my comment card that prompted the airport to act - obviously other travellers who weren't rushed, fed up or fatalistically pessimistic about the likelihood of anything being done decided to fill them in too.
So on my most recent trip from Dublin, I was able to have something other than a "heart attack on a plate" hot meal or a takeaway sandwich with nowhere to take it in Terminal B. There's still nowhere to take it. The lack of available seating is laughable.
It's not like I want to eat that much at the airport, but with checking in taking a lot less time and being not yet confident enough to leave it a bit later - I'm never sure what the delay will be like at shoe central - I sometimes end up with more time than I thought . . . and this time I filled it with food.
Feeling good about the salad and smoothie healthy option I decided that, with some time on my hands, I'd avail of the airport's Wi-Fi facility and deal with some of the e-mails that were waiting on my laptop. It had gone so well until then - the check-in, the food, finding somewhere to sit down - that I felt on a roll. I was still feeling on a roll when I opened up the laptop and it automatically found the DAA site. I could buy my Wi-Fi time online too, which was perfect.
Eircom is the service provider and, when the site asked for my phone number, I thought that seamless technology had finally arrived. With my phone number, my time online could be charged to my normal Eircom bill. I was ready to praise Eircom for the first time in my life. It didn't work out like that.
Eircom wanted my credit card details. As I'm not paranoid about Wi-Fi security (though I'm not sure about it in a hotspot area) I entered them. Eircom didn't like my credit card number (though not for reasons of credit). The message was that I'd input "invalid" characters. I've been caught with that before when I hadn't put in spaces between the numbers. I tried again with spaces. Still invalid.
Seamless technology was creaking at the seams! However, the site listed places where I could buy vouchers which would get me online. Unfortunately, no one knew what I was talking about. Eventually, an assistant told me they might be available in a restaurantwhich hadn't been brought into the airside community, so it was off limits.
I gave up. I was tempted to go for another smoothie, but there's only so much healthy eating you can take.
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