British newspapers are atwitter regarding three-hour immigration lines at London’s airports, especially Heathrow. All of the focus is on changing the behavior of a government agency and its unionized workforce so that the lines are shorter. Why not instead assume that the agency and the unions won’t change and redesign the experience?
Despite the 19 years and $6.4 billion spent on Terminal 5, for example, they don’t seem to have planned for the possibility of the immigration process turning into an India-style all-day line. Disney and other theme parks have already worked this out, though. So why not take the best ideas from that world? The first thing that could be done is to space passengers out, instead of dumping everyone from every transatlantic flight into the line during a short morning time block. Encourage passengers to linger a while rather than rush to get in line.
How to do this? A lot of passengers will be hungry. I was on an “economy plus” British Airways ticket. This sells for up to $5000 round-trip. The breakfast served on the flight is a single cold muffin, served by flight attendants who communicate very clearly that they’d rather be doing almost anything else other than working. Unlike a $69 JetBlue flight, there are no snacks available to passengers who get hungry. So why not have some nice breakfast restaurants prior to the immigration lines? A place to take a shower or sleep for a few hours? An Internet cafe? (due to the lack of power outlets or free WiFi in the terminal, should be popular)
The line itself could also be redesigned. People come to London to see Shakespeare, Madame Tussauds wax museum, etc. Why not bring these attractions to the line? There are plenty of unemployed actors in England who would be happy to perform Shakespeare scenes in front of the audience of hundreds that are assembled. London musicals could send singers over to perform the most popular parts of musicals to which they hope to sell tickets. At every turn in the line there could be a Madame Tussaud wax figure with accompanying information.
This seems like a better idea than hoping for a government bureaucracy to improve dramatically.
[Could the process be speeded up if the government bureaucracy were motivated? It would appear so. During my time in the line, I observed that at least 30 percent of the agents at Heathrow were idle. There are separate queues for UK/EU passport holders, business class travelers, travelers who’ve signed up to a special biometric screening process, etc. Instead of all of these queues feeding into a large group of agents, each queue is served by its own small group of agents. So when the business class queue runs dry, the agents responsible that queue sit idly staring into space, their eyes occasionally meeting jetlagged passengers standing in the three-hour “non-UK/EU” line. Probably the waiting time could be reduced by 30-50 percent simply by having all the agents able to take customers from any queue as necessary.
If 30 percent of the Heathrow agents were idle, probably 80 percent of the border control agents around the U.K. were sitting idle at the same time that we were waiting in line at Heathrow. They might have been waiting, for example, for the next flight to land in Manchester. Given such a large pool of workers who are being paid not to work, a company that cared about customers and productivity would probably set up a video link system so that some passengers could be screened by putting passports into a scanner and having a videoconference with an agent at an airport that didn’t happen to be busy. This would surely bring the waiting times down to just a few minutes, without the border control people having to change the number of employees or the amount of time spent talking to the average arriving person.
Separately, of course the border control people are wasting a huge amount of time hassling low-risk passengers. I’m a middle-aged middle-income American passport holder who makes periodic short business trips to England. Long ago they should figured out that my passport (almost 10 years old) is one that they’ve seen at intervals and for short trips. Given the parlous state of the British economy, the idea that I would want to stay there and work illegally is absurd. Given my age, the idea that I would represent more of a terrorist threat than the UK’s own homegrown terrorists (who tend to be angry young men) is absurd. But if they want to have 3-minute conversations with every guy like me, they could do it without the lines simply by bringing in otherwise idle agents via videoconference.]
Is the issue one of capacity of agents in the building, or one of arrival timing of passengers?
I like your idea of videoconferencing….
Can that be done while the passengers are on the aircraft?
Provide a row of seats with voip phones, and multiple webcams and do preliminary screening in flight, with any passengers requiring secondary screening or further services to have a face to face conversation at immigration. Pre-screened passengers can just walk through a line getting their passport stamped.
Or attached to each lavatory, place a webcam and biometric sensor, and then you do the same as above, but the airline doesn’t have to devote a row to it. Just walk back to your seat and conduct the screening via voip over the aircraft’s wifi.
Thinking of Disney – FastPass. Give them a ticket with a time to come back to the head of the line. Then they can wait in the restaurants, lounges, etc. spending money and doing productive things while waiting.
The real tragedy of the situation is the British customs officials have zero motivation to change things. They get the same government pensions and union negotiated salaries regardless of how long (and how miserably) the poor passengers are stuck in the queue.
Regarding the EU/Non-EU queues, they should create another line just for Americans. Give it minimal staff, and require every one to place their 10 fingerprints and be taken a photo. Perhaps then you would understand how foreign citizens are treated at US airports. It often takes me more than 1h just to get through the passport queue at major airports.
In any case, both in Europe and in the US, when queues for local citizens are empty they generally use them for all the rest. Not sure if this is happening at Heathrow, but it would be pathetic if it wasn’t.
Videoconferencing? are you off your melon? who’s gonna pay fot that, you? all our money has been spent in the bailout of 2008, the loose change in the Olympics. Didn’t you notice?
Plus, queuing is a fine way of strengthening you moral fibre, and instill the virtues of patience, perseverane and respect for other people’s place.
Tiago: As noted in the original posting, there were empty queues and idle personnel at Heathrow, yet the non-UK/EU passport holders were not sent over to them.
Jerry: I think your idea of videoconferencing on the airplane is a great one. For a country like Britain that is trying to cut down on asylum-seekers it might be even better to have the videoconference from the departure airport. Most of the passengers on an international flight end up with a fair amount of time to kill at the departure gate so why not put that to use with a video conference? If the Brits decide that the person should be denied entry, that can be sorted out before the person arrives on British soil.
I suspect the video conferencing idea would turn into an expensive IT debacle, with network timeouts, blue screens, washed out video etc… But I would like to see clowns entertaining the crowd! as long as they aren’t the ones with the last laugh 🙂
If you are going to do this trip again I would suggest you get a new travel agent! For much less than $5k you could get a Delta business class return direct from Boston to Heathrow – sure they don’t have the best business class but it would be far better than BA Economy. At least they will give you a FastTrack card to get you out of Heathrow far more quickly.
You might need to shop around a bit but it is probably going to be easier and more practical than de-unionising the British customs workforce. And you can subtract the small amount of time and effort of finding a good business class flight / price from the hours of suffering on the plane and then waiting in line at Heathrow.
A while back Heathrow was looking at charging 50 pounds for a Fast Track pass, which I think would be a good investment if the lines are extreme. I’m not sure whether they went ahead with it. Sadly though in some ways this would be a terrible thing for most passengers as it would incentivise the airport to make the standard lines even longer.
It is interesting to note that Hong Kong and Singapore and Beijing airports don’t seem to struggle with this problem – all of which carry similar passenger numbers as Heathrow. In fact every, immigrations in Singapore is so quick and painless that ever time I go through it I look back and think “far out, was that it?”
In Australia the government has been trying to get a system working that replaces the customs officials with a machine-gate that reads the chip in your passport and lets you through. I guess it also tries to read your facial expression and decide whether you’re a bad guy. I first tried to use one a few years ago and it didn’t work. Every time I come back to Australia I watch people try use them and it seems they’re still not working. But hopefully they’ll finally iron out the glitches and the system can be rolled out globally, until the machines become self-aware and start to unionise…
Alex: I said that the economy plus was offered by BA at $5000 round-trip (including one cold muffin for breakfast!). I didn’t say that I’d paid it! (The price for economy plus from BOS to LHR wasn’t too horrific, so I paid for that and flew regular economy back at a $2000 savings on that leg).
Phil,
the EU/UK stations will not have the stamp required for non-EU passports. Of course it would be easy to give them the stamp but that’s not how it works. I suspect it is related to unionization. Speaking from a lot of experience, when you get off of the plane in Terminal 5, if you are economy/economy + RUN to immigration. This is not a time to look dignified. Most flights get into Heathrow in the morning. I always take the last flight out from the West coast so there are relatively fewer passengers in line when I roll in late afternoon, although I have waited as long as 90 minutes in January 2012. When they interview you, just tell them you are there on business, you’re an engineer and here’s your business card. They never spend more than 60 seconds with me.
A lot of our customers can be greatly affected by extensively long passport queues, for example, a customer who has booked a Meet and Greet parking service. They would have given an estimated time of arrival to the parking operator, but with longer queues they are finding that to be a bit harder to do.
We have undertaken and initiative on Twitter to create the Hashtag “#PassportQueues”. We are asking that travellers tweet us (@EssentialTravel) or include the Hashtag and state their time spent waiting in queues at UK border control desks.