The worst airport in the world

When London airport was blocked by snow, just before Christmas 2010, administrators came to Montreal to find the solution.

From 2011 to 2017, Normand Boivin was responsible for operations at Heathrow, one of the largest airports in the world. One of his biggest “operations” was to plan the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people for the 2012 Olympic Games.

I met him when I got off the plane and every time I set foot in the sad Montreal airport, I think of what he said to me that day in July, three days before the ceremony. opening.

“An airport is a business of emotions,” he told me while sipping coffee – because everything had been planned down to the smallest detail and he was not at all stressed.

What do you mean, a business of emotions?

“People are anxious. Their patience is limited. Before even thinking about being pleasant, you just have to avoid giving reasons to criticize. Nobody comes here for the airport. If people forget they’re there, that’s fine. »

This is very obvious, indeed, but all people want to do when they arrive at the airport is to get out as quickly as possible, one way or the other.

And this is exactly where Trudeau Airport shows Olympic-caliber incompetence: it seems like we have forgotten the obvious.

Whether you want to enter to catch a plane or try to flee the place after landing, almost everything is more painful, longer, more unpleasant than elsewhere.

Remember that we are not able to bring in enough buses to transport passengers.

Do you want to take a taxi? They are there. They stamp their feet. Customers are there too, happy to spend $50 or $100 as quickly as possible. But it’s trickle-down, on a tiny portion of sidewalk, that the cars arrive.

I did not talk about the congestion of the access route, which took 10 years to build, nor about the luggage which seems to be making an endless journey itself between the plane and the terminal.

But for an international airport of very average size, Montreal guarantees you one of the worst experiences.

It goes without saying that it is not “the fault” of Aéroports de Montréal (ADM), well not only.

Air Canada and other airlines did not hire enough employees after the pandemic, even though the influx of customers was known.

Transports Québec dragged its feet in developing the access roads, and it continues.

The federal government took control of the airports 30 years ago and acts as if they could be self-financing.

The Société de transport de Montréal is not good at organizing transportation well, and dares to call this bus line “747” – see the text by my colleague Philippe Mercure.

Except that ADM’s job is precisely to make these things happen that are not up to her. To manage the details.

When I hear the spokesperson (not even the president) of ADM at Paul Arcand say that he is “shocked” by the situation, I feel like saying: how can we be caught off guard? It’s not as if this influx is unpredictable, sudden like a flood: people buy their tickets well in advance.

And what exactly do you do to resolve this, other than deploring the situation which is the fault of others? Are we waiting for the REM with our fingers crossed? We look hard at the calendar and say to ourselves: summer is over, will autumn be calm?

When I met Normand Boivin in London, he told me that he had personally summoned three ministers (Transport, Public Security, Sports) from the British Cabinet to “shake them up” before the Olympics.

However, he was only a foreigner, number two at the airport. But he got his message across.

“I told them: what do we do if the airspace is congested? We [Heathrow] is a private company, but we provide an eminently public service, we serve the country’s economy. They reacted. The politicians here are no different from ours! »

It can be transferred word for word to the Montreal situation. The airport is not just a “showcase”, it is a critical economic infrastructure.

At the moment, in terms of access, this airport is perhaps, yes, the worst in the world.