Manchester Airport

[shillelagh]

Is this right? Comes from AOHELL News.

Britain's third largest airport is to start charging drivers for picking up travellers from its terminals.
Motorists will now be forced to park and pay up to £1.80 for ollecting friends and relatives from Manchester airport. A spokesman for the airport, which handles 22.5 million visitors a year, said the decision to charge was for 'safety and security' reasons along with reducing the impact on the environment by encouraging travellers to use public transport.
The airport, owned by The Manchester Airports Group, made £35million in parking charges last year alone. It will make another £900,000 from parking when the changes come in force.
From November 1, people collecting passengers on flights using Terminal 1 will be directed into the short-stay car park, and will no longer be able to collect from outside the terminal building.
Charges for parking in the short-stay car parks for less than 30 minutes will be at least £1.80. The ten minutes of free parking in the Terminal 1 arrivals car park will no longer be available.The new system will be implemented at Terminal 3 in December and Terminal 2 in January 2007. The charges will not apply to taxis or mini-cabs.

Bosses at the airport said they have no plans yet to charge people for dropping-off passengers.
Andy Cliffe, car parks commercial director at Manchester Airport, said: "There are restrictions that prevent people from waiting outside the terminal buildings. For safety and security reasons we have decided to enforce these procedures more rigorously to improve traffic flow and reduce the chance of road accidents.''
A spokesman for the airport said he did not know of any accidents that had actually occurred at the airport involving passenger pick-ups.

[SPUGGIE J]

More money grabbing at the expense of travellers. Taxi drivers must have been moaning about loss of income to these people.

[West Ender]

I'm flying back from Malta on October 31st - to Terminal 2. My eldest daughter is picking me up - it will be around midnight. She did the same thing about a year ago and, when she arrived and couldn't see me (I was still waiting for my baggage which took an hour to arrive), she popped inside to see if I was there. She went straight back to her car, it must have been less than 1 minute, and found a parking fine slapped on her windscreen - £40.

[slinky]

I am sure this is already happening Shill......... Ginger (taxi driver) went a couple of weeks ago and was told he would have to park up ( and pay) until the customers came out.

It doesn't matter for the taxi drivers because they just charge the people more to cover the cost of having to wait. But I do think it is just one big money making scam.

I think you should have a certain amount of FREE time to wait, then any longer than that they can charge a small fee.

[jambutty]

Yet another ruse to make more money using security as an excuse.

[katex]

S'easy .. what we did in Alicante, Spain the other week to meet my son, was ask him to walk round to Departures and picked him up from there .. kept in touch by text to make sure was there. Was only the next floor .. not exactly sure of the distance from Arrivals/Departures at Man. Airport though, think just floor below ?

[harwood red]

Originally Posted by katex

S'easy .. what we did in Alicante, Spain the other week to meet my son, was ask him to walk round to Departures and picked him up from there .. kept in touch by text to make sure was there. Was only the next floor .. not exactly sure of the distance from Arrivals/Departures at Man. Airport though, think just floor below ?

That is exactly what I have done.... just pull in to departures as if you are dropping someone off and if there is a delay or a traffic warden around it is easy enough to just drive round and come back into departures again!

But make sure you tell the person you are picking up that you will be in departures...oh yeah and how to get there from arrivals