Changing pains

Change is a traumatic experience or so it may seem if you were to sit at the busy mumbai airport terminal. Over the years lot has been done in airports and by airlines around the world to make air travel a more pleasant and stress free experience. Those of us who travel around the world will have experienced the exceptionally well planned Changi airport to the less glamorous but comfortable european airports. Many of us are not so good observers of the nuances of travel. But there is one thing you could not have missed or you would have had to be deaf. In Mumbai airport it seems a noisy environment is sought to be created by constant reminders to check-in, security etc while airports across the world even those having much greater frequency of flights are so quiet you could sleep off in the waiting areas. This I think is a practice from decades earlier when flights were much fewer and most travellers were unfamiliar with the airport environment and what they needed to do. This is not the case today when most people are not first time travellers and the frequency of flights is such that reminders could continue without a pause.Sitting and waiting for the flight becomes a stressful experience. So why does mumbai airport management continue with this practice? The only reason could be that it is just too difficult for airport management to think about stopping something that has been going on for years. It probably seems to many up there that it is critical for these reminders to continue..how else will passengers know what to do? Stopping these announcements probably seems akin to removing traffic signals...dangerous and disruptive. And how would top management know what is good for the customer unless there was a structured process by which management would source ideas for improvement from the customer (in this case the traveller)? But just stop to think..have you ever asked patients whether they like the smell in the rooms or the difficulty of standing in queues?