Love waiting for the bags?
Sometimes, when traveling, you want to just be able to pick up all the good things and bring them back to your home country… like food specialties or quaint cultural traditions. So, on this trip, speaking as a frequent traveler, I found yet another “good thing” to bring home. At the Amsterdam airport (Schiphol), I actually enjoyed waiting for my luggage. That was because there was a convenient screen above the carousel indicating the current time and the expected arrival time of the first bags (there were just our minutes to wait). This concept, much like the tube in London (and some metro lines in Paris), seems to take the pinch out of waiting. Of course, the unfortunate anecdote here is that my suitcase didn’t come out after four minutes. The screen flashed “First bags on the belt”… but then the first bags came (and disappeared with their owners) and the belt stopped. It turns out that my suitcase was diverted into the “transit” set. As such, my suitcase along with some nice Chinese fellow passenger’s last suitcase, appeared 15 minutes later. Human error foils technological progress (again). Why don’t all airports invest in this type of signage!
Just back in Paris and noted that CDG has instituted new screens with comparable (although not exactly the same) information on the bag arrivals…. A few differences are worth noting: There is only one screen off on the side for the entire area. The arrival time for the bags is a range. For the flight from Narita, it was a 50 minute range (what punishment after a 12 hour flight)! For my flight from Amsterdam, the range was 20 minutes and the bags started to arrive at the half way mark. Amazing to observe the different notions of time.