Dear Norwich International, This Isn't Working Anymore

Norwich Airport has done it again, threatening to raise the airport tax from £3 to £5 hot off the heels of controversy over lax security and an alarming reduction in the number of passengers using the airport.  The Fine City's Airport is self-destructing, continuing to make one bizarre and nonsensical decision after another, with no reasonable business plan, wasting what little goodwill it has left and alienating it's current supporters.  It's like the Brittany Spears of airports.  And I have to admit, I'm falling out of love with Norwich International.

I write this with a heavy heart, as I am a big time fan of Norwich Airport.  With my family and friends back in the States, I've traveled a couple times a year back to Kansas, and struggled confused and overladen through all the major airports between here and London--Stanstead, Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton, and the NIA.  Like Big Brother contestants, each one has it's own personality, none of them likable.  Stanstead is a crotch-grabbing, track suit-wearing, gold chain-swinging, Burberry cap twisted just a little to the left-toting Superchav, smacking your shins with over sized fluorescent carry-on luggage while blathering away on a mobile phone in a voice so loud it could only belong on Jeremy Kyle.  Luton fancies itself a mortgage broker, stiff and seemingly respectable, but always with the vague sense that there's something lurid brewing underneath.  The Gatwick bustles like a night-shift gigging cabbie--loud, impatient, slightly aggrieved that you're bothering it with something as loathsome as your custom.  Heathrow, mother of them all, reminiscent of the Prime Minister--heaving at the seams trying to hold together something everyone knows isn't working while being surrounded by assholes, and responsible for overseeing a complex system that ludicrously overcharges for everything. 

Norwich seemed to offer relief from these things.  It's small, as friendly as a British airport can get, and as there's very few other actual customers, you've got lots of time to sit and think.  So Norwich Airport and I started seeing more of each other.  The first few trips were bliss--in and out easily, no problems with luggage, and they even let me get through passport control one time when they could have sent me packing back to Kansas.  But then, after we'd been seeing each other for a while, Norwich Airport started to change.  I began to feel she wanted more than just my time--she wanted my cash, too.  The first indicator of this was when she started charging me £3 just to get to the gates.  This may not seem like a lot, but here's the thing--THEY ALREADY CHARGE AIRPORT TAX IN THE PRICE OF THE TICKET.  So this is like a Super Plus Double Ungood Tax.  If it was included in the price of the ticket, I probably wouldn't be complaining about it, but since you have to go through an actual machine and you can see your money being eaten up right in front of you so the airport can put in a few more 'Chewable Toothbrush' machines in the men's room--well that just hurts, frankly.  And £3?  Sure that's not a huge amount, but it's the cost of the beer I was going to get to calm my nerves before the flight, that means Daddy travels with rage.  Suddenly, I began to wonder if Norwich International really cared about me, or was just using me for my pocket change.

Then I found out you could bypass the £3 charge, and almost the entire security system, by just hopping the fence and jumping on a plane.  While NIA told me this was a one off, that it wouldn't happen again, and that it loved me the most, I was starting to lose trust.  But NIA was only getting started--she tried to blame me and all the people of Norwich for not using her enough, saying we would just as easily turn on her for Chavstead or Gatwick.  These mood swings, combined with £8 bacon rolls and the fact that the men's room is ALWAYS being cleaned when you need to use it, made me consider breaking it off.  And then, two days after I booked my latest flight to Kansas, she tells me it's gonna be a fiver from now on.  Does her greed know no bounds?  Damn you Norwich International Airport, I tried to love you.  But it was never enough, was it?  It was never enough.

So, sadly, this is both an article, and a break up letter.   Norwich International Airport, we were good for a while.  But I've changed, and more importantly, you've changed, and I think our priorities are in different places now.   I think it would be better if we spent some time apart.  I'd like to see other airports--and I know that's not what I said a few months back, but Heathrow just got a whole new terminal, and he didn't ask me for a dime for that ***.  You want me to pay £5 so you can get a new fruit machine for your hideous bar/deli complex.  And that's not right, and it's not how I roll.  So goodbye, Norwich International, it's been a good run.

Gotta run for now, I'm all choked up.

-W