On the Web, Travelers Fly Off the Handle at JFK Airport

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

A producer who spends much of her time traveling by air to corporate video shoots, Sylvan Solloway said she has done everything she can to try to avoid John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Transporting heavy bags of video equipment through JFK’s maze of construction detours and winding hallways always earns her ire, as do the airport’s cramped gates, where multiple flights are announced at the same time.

“It’s chaos. It’s a mess,” she said of the airport.

Ms. Solloway isn’t suffering in private anymore. At Facebook.com, she recently joined a group called Air Warriors, where hundreds of fellow travelers can vent, exchange notes, and alert each other to the best, and worst, of the airways. This is but one example of a booming online community that includes roughly 600 groups on Yahoo.com, more than 800 New York-centric bloggers on travelblog.org, and tens of thousands of other online forums ranging from Epinions to Travel-rants.com.

Many of these groups are now aggressively turning their attention to JFK in anticipation of the looming holiday travel crush. They are doing so now because the season promises to be yet another record-breaker, generating historic levels of traffic and congestion. JFK is their target because the airport, as New York’s primary international hub, is a major haunt of the city’s travelgentsia.

“JFK should be a beacon to airports around the world, but other than the introduction of the Airlink train, the airport is pretty demoralizing,” another Air Warriors member, Joseph Jaffe, who travels by plane most weeks, said. Mr. Jaffe said he wants fast-tracks, Wi-Fi access, and more premium restaurants and other amenities. For some Air Warriors, the frustration is more visceral. “What’s with the smell?” Jai Decker asked of the airport’s seating areas. Mr. Decker, who has traveled out of New York to 53 countries, also wants more facilities for children, such as family-friendly movies or cartoons. “You ever try to quell a herd of kids after two hours while waiting for a flight?” he said.

A group not quite two months old, Air Warriors already boasts a few hundred members and is quickly growing. Still, founder Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur who also launched the travel/social Web site AirTroductions, said he has only modest ambitions for the group. He said he sees it as a place for people to chat and help each other out, and doubts whether any air travel club could achieve the strength that the Straphangers Campaign has for subway riders. “If you do a lot of international travel out of New York City, what are you going to do, boycott JFK?” he said.

Analysts say the Web groups will pack more punch than they realize. “Some of these comments may be absolutely irrelevant, or even flat-out stupid,” a vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research, Henry Harteveldt, said. “But the fact that you have a growing number of these sites and contributors is proof of the frustration that is out there.” Mr. Harteveldt, who travels more than 225,000 miles a year, said JFK’s operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, needs to modernize terminals 2, 3, and 6 to handle the boom in traffic, and it needs to do so quickly.

Having said that, Mr. Harteveldt added that the Port Authority and various airlines have done a great deal to improve the airport. The agency spent $94 billion on capital improvements in the city’s three airports, including JFK. Among other factors, these investments have led to the modernization of terminals 1 and 4 in previous years, as well as the recent launch of the AirTrain. American Airlines’s new complex at terminals 8 and 9 is likewise expected to improve the quality of life at JFK, as well the JetBlue Airways facility that will be completed at terminal 5 late next year.

The Port Authority plans to do more. The agency has earmarked at least $4 billion for airport upgrades and increased the number of red-jacketed Customer Care Representatives by 50% this year. It has also launched a Flight Delay Task Force to lobby federal officials on the subject of flight routes and scheduling in the Northeast. “We have devoted considerable financial resources to see that our airports meet the highest standards,” a spokesman for the Port Authority, Pasquale DiFulco, said. The aggrieved Air Warriors and other travelers do not dispute that fact. They are even aware of Port Authority passenger surveys that make a stab at gauging customer satisfaction with the airport.

Instead, passengers are arguing that the Port Authority needs to start talking to them — a lot — about what is happening at the airport. Engaging passengers in comprehensive talks, they said, will do more than just spur suggestions: It will help rally much-needed political support for the agency and even provide a marketing boon.

“JFK still has the reputation of being the ‘Oh man, I have to go through this place again’ airport,” Mr. Shankman said. “The Port Authority has done little, if anything, to do away with this stigma.”


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