ATL eyes airport reforms, but grounds best idea

As someone who flies quite a bit for work and leisure, I have no shortage of annoying and even bizarre travel stories.

Airport employees lost my luggage somewhere between Bosnia and Poland; on another flight, my airplane landed in the wrong Sicilian city; and Egyptian airport workers admitted they had no idea which airplane was mine on another occasion.

This is just a sampling, and while they each make for an entertaining retelling, more mundane issues at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson can also be a real drag on air travel.

TSA security lines can sometimes take hours to traverse, the airport is often mobbed with throngs of people, bathroom lines can be incredibly long, especially for female bathroom goers, and air traffic congestion can cause serious delays. These are regular occurrences at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, which is the world’s busiest airport. Thanks to TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection rule changes and a new airport chief, there may be some relief on the way, but I am not sure it will be enough.

For those of you without TSA PreCheck or CLEAR, there is some good news that might make security lines a little less irritating and slightly quicker. Due to a new rule as of July 8, travelers will no longer have to remove their shoes before trudging through security, like they’ve done since 2006. It’s a small victory, but let’s celebrate it anyway.

Beyond this, international travel is poised to improve as well. “The process of a Customs and Border Protection officer manually reviewing American passports at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport has been replaced with tablets that capture a passenger’s image and compare it with the government’s image database,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

“You still need your passport easily accessible. But if there’s no issue, a passenger can now walk through within a few seconds.” This might give some travelers creepy Big Brother vibes, but it isn’t much different from how Global Entry has worked for years. Take it from me, it is a breeze.

Meanwhile, Hartsfield-Jackson’s newly installed general manager, Ricky Smith, is looking to shake things up at the world’s busiest airport. “After three months of a listening tour, Smith said what he has come to realize is that while Atlanta often hangs its hat on superlatives as the ‘busiest’ and ‘most efficient’ airport, that sometimes feels more true for its airlines than its passengers,” the Journal-Constitution noted.

“When you’re standing in lines for food and retail shops, it doesn’t feel like the most efficient,” Smith exclaimed, “The restrooms, they don’t feel like the most efficient […] Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to go spend my day at Hartsfield-Jackson.’ People want to fly.” As someone who has spent countless hours there, I agree.

To make the airport more customer-oriented, he and a corps of airport employees will finalize a strategic plan by the end of the year. Time will tell what it entails, but adding more bathrooms and restaurants, scaling up mission-critical staff and adding more security lines and officers might make the list. However, without giving the airport a complete and very expensive makeover, which probably isn’t in the cards, I am not sure how much of an improvement they can really deliver.

I think this entire exercise masks the real problem. The Atlanta airport was not originally intended to be the world’s busiest, and it shows. Implementing changes to incrementally improve the airport experience is a positive step, but it is time to more seriously consider something much bolder: a reliever airport.

Numerous big cities have done just this. New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles for example each boast more than one commercial airport. If Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson is bursting at the seams and unable to provide an acceptable level of customer service, then perhaps we should join the ranks of cities with more than one commercial hub.

This has, in fact, been contemplated before. “In 2011, the city of Atlanta joined others to study eight possible locations for a second airport,” according to 11 Alive News, although they “concluded none of them would bring the right benefit for the cost.” Atlanta even seems adamant about preventing competition. The city sued Paulding County a handful of years ago over a plan to build a commercial airport. Competition is not welcome.

So in the end, Smith, TSA and Customs are thankfully working to improve air travel, but the biggest possible improvement is apparently off the table for metro Atlanta. Preventing competition apparently trumps better customer experience.