Airports that keep you fit

Been to most of the above — notice CDG isn’t on the list! By far my longest trek was at Madrid-i Me and girlfriend hop of the Metro and trek further than it takes me to play a round of golf — and I’n sh**te at golf– the Easyjet bar was a nice substitute for the 19th hole!

I was exhausted after the schlep in Beijing. Amazing structure, though.

The distance alone, though, is irrelevant, so these figures are pretty meaningless on their own. HKG has travelators throughout, and the train which goes the length of the main section of the terminal every 2 minutes. You can get from one end to the other without actually walking more than a few hundred yards

BKK, on the other hand, has very few travelators and no train, and somehow I always seem to leave from gates that are miles away! The worst is transferring in BKK – that really can make you fit!! I am a fast walker, and a couple of times it has taken me almost half an hour to walk between gates (so probably around 2 miles)

MartynSinclair – 16/08/2012 16:08 GMT

I could scarcely believe my bleary eyes when I saw at the security/boarding card inspection point at Beijing Capital that they advised allowing 30-35 minutes to get to the gates at the furthest reaches of the airport. Even after you’ve taken the shuttle, you then face a 20-25 minutes walk and there are no travellators to whisk you there. After having enjoyed the stunning architecture, it does not take long before you realise that the place is too big for its own good. Whilst Capital may have been designed with growth capacity in mind, this is at the clear expense of its passengers. It also provided the slowest baggage delivery I have ever witnessed: a good 90 minutes after arrival.

Anyone planning on transiting through the place needs to be sure to leave a good 90-120 minutes or you simply wont make it.

I don’t think they bothered to go to BKK, because that is DEFINITELY further to walk than HKG or JFK (albeit travelling in F makes the gate-to-lounge buggy journey a complete pleasure – beep beep!)… As an aside, Cheeryguy mentions travellators – I’ve definitely seen a few travellator incidents at BKK – one person trips up coming off the travellator, and then a bunch of people pile on top of them…

They’ve also not calculated the DXB number correctly, as EK seems to park half of its planes in T1 – the furthest gate of which is definitely a good 20-25 minute walk from the lounges – i.e. at least a mile (and why no buggy for First class?)

Seems odd for them to include shuttle transfers in the distance, as PEK seems a pretty manageable airport in comparison to some of the others. I suppose that’s how they got to ZRH being 2km, given that Pier E is 2km away by shuttle…

Crap journalism, as ever…

The new airport in Delhi has really long piers, especially for domestic arrivals and whilst they do have travelators the invariably aren’t working.

What’s always annoying is that each gate between the very last one and the arrivals area is generally empty……

Having a check up last year with my Doctor, he asked me which sports I was praticing: among walking and some bike, I told him,as a frequent traveller, I was running many times a month from Gate 1 to Gate 100 (Airport connection’s Murphy’s law) with a 8 kg backpack and a 10 kg wheeled handbag…!