OPINION:
On an epic yet failed odyssey last week, I had a revelation. Sprinting for 40 minutes on disembarkation, through arrivals, along travelators, via a giant car park, to a bus, on a highway to another terminal and a new set of departures, on a further connecting train, through the duty-free shop and down an interminable corridor to discover that I had, sadly, and by two minutes, missed my next connection, I came to this conclusion. Madrid-Barajas is the Worst Airport in the World.
It wasn’t the fact that the separate terminals are about as handily located as planets in a solar system, so that in order to get from one to another in a timely fashion you need to break the speed of light. Nor that the social engineers who designed its mighty architecture conceived a winding pathway to ensure passengers are steered through every tiny dispensary and retail opportunity in order to direct you even further from your flight.
No, it was the lack of signage that completely mystified me. Not even in Spanish. There were no clues in sight. Travellers are presumably expected to intuit that Terminal “4S” is an appendage of Terminal 4 accessed via a secret train that can be located only through employing Spidey sense.
Flailing around, yelping at various people wearing tabards, I felt like Anneka Rice in Treasure Hunt, the ancient television game show in which she traversed the country using cryptic clues and local knowledge to find the winning spoils. At one point, just as in the TV show, I was joined by an enthusiastic staff member who jogged alongside me to demonstrate a faster route. Or at least that’s what he told me as we raced into an empty concrete car park in which I couldn’t see another soul. Whatever...he wore a lanyard and seemed to have an insider’s knowledge of the plot.