It’s the absolute scourge of taking anyone to an airport … the ‘rip-off’ drop-off fees they charge and threatening signs everywhere.
It used to be a pleasure travelling but airports have turned taking passengers there and picking them up needlessly stressful and farcically expensive.
Paying to park your car at the airport while you’re away on holiday is one thing, paying to just drop off or pick up passengers is quite another and, I’d argue, impossible to justify, especially as Manchester Airport made more than £73m profit before tax in the year ending March 2024 and Leeds Bradford made almost £33m.
Dropping off in front of Leeds Bradford Airport is now a hefty £7 while at Manchester it’s £5 if you’re ultra quick and in and out in 5 minutes, £6.20 if its 10 minutes and £25 if you’re any longer.
You can now only pay your Manchester drop-off fee online by midnight the following day and, should you forget, you’ll get charged a £100 fine as well, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days.
The pick-up fee at Manchester is £6.40 by the way and you’re allowed 30 minutes at Terminal 1 but just 15 minutes at terminals 2 and 3 for that just to add a bit more complexity to the whole painful process.
Don’t forget to enjoy all the passive aggressive signs – light on the passive and heavy on the aggression – threatening fines for this, that and t’other as you drive around Manchester Airport – you’re clearly not welcome here for long and there is nowhere on the airport you can pick passengers up for free.
Leeds Bradford isn’t far behind with its own intimidating collection of signs strewn throughout its car parks.
I don’t know anyone who takes the remotest pleasure in dropping off or picking up at Manchester. Talk about so-called Kiss and Fly – you’ve hardly time to stop the car never mind a quick peck on the cheek if you’re out to beat the 5 minute deadline – especially as you’re then faced with pedestrian crossings and passengers walking across them to stop or slow you down as you try to leave.
Manchester is even more galling as the information about how to drop off on its website is illustrated by a couple of young women laughing, smiling – nay, possibly even joking – in their car. All the faces I see in cars driving around Manchester Airport are etched with tension and frustration bordering on exasperating anger.
The airports will always defend themselves saying the money they reap is reinvested into airport facilities and to put people off using their cars and rely on public transport instead, but I’m struggling to see past nothing much more than corporate greed.
Trains to Manchester Airport are hideously unreliable – especially with all the cancellations caused by the Transpennine Route Upgrade – and everyone knows Leeds Bradford is a nightmare to access by public transport.
It’s kind of like Monopoly money. They have the monopoly and you pay them your money.
But, actually, you do have a choice.
Yes, at last there’s a but – there are free drop off zones at both Leeds Bradford and Manchester which they don’t tend to shout too loudly about.
So we’ll yell it for them.
The Leeds Bradford one is the most convenient. When you’re going down the road, Whitehouse Lane, next to the airport don’t turn in where you’d drop your passengers in front of the terminal buildings but continue along the road for another couple of hundred yards or so and you’ll see a sign for a free one-hour drop off. Turn right into it – the barrier automatically lifts – and then hard right into a tiny car park. Its postcode is LS19 7UE.
OK, it’s hard to manoeuvre around it as it’s so small because, well, it’s free so why make life easy? The airport reckons it’s a 3 to 4 minute walk to the terminal building but I think even Usain Bolt would struggle to manage it in that time dragging his suitcase. Think more like 10 minutes at least.
Overstay your welcome and you’ll get hit with the daily charge of £68 for the car park. Yes, £68. Not the world’s greatest car parking bargain.
At Manchester it’s more tricky as they’ve inconveniently placed the free one-hour drop-off car park well away from the terminals so the only way for your passengers to get there is by the free shuttle bus so you’ll need to leave loads more time for your journey to the airport. They say the shuttle bus takes 6 minutes but I guess it goes to 3 terminals so it’s likely to take a lot longer than that to get round them all and it depends how often it shows up at the car park
The free car park is way over on the left off as you enter the airport terminals from the M56. As you come off the motorway follow the signs in the left hand lane for Terminal 2 and, as you approach a roundabout, you’ll come across a sign about the free drop-off telling you to turn left towards JetParks 1.
Go along there – it’s called Enterprise Way – and then left at the traffic lights onto reasonably narrow Thorley Lane with the car park on the left behind some bushes. Judging by the lack of cars using it no-one knows it’s there or reckon it’s too far out to bother using it. Its postcode is M90 5AZ.
Beware you can only drop off there … there are signs saying you can’t pick up so there is absolutely no free pick-up anywhere at Manchester Airport.
I asked Leeds Bradford and Manchester how much they’d reaped from drop off and pick up fees in the last two years but neither provided any figures and they are not in their accounts published on the Companies House website.
Manchester Airport added: “The reason we offer a free drop off area but not a free pick up area is because of the dwell time associated with picking passengers up. People are likely to stay for much longer meaning we would need much more space than we have available.
“Drop off fees form part of our overall revenue. Profits are used largely to improve our facilities like the £1.3bn project to completely renew Terminal 2 and expand our operation.”
The Leeds Bradford Airport response suggests more people should use public transport to get there even though there’s no rail line to the airport.
They say: “Airports use a variety of different ways to support passengers to think about how they get to and from airports, including drop-off and parking fees. These help them reduce congestion, noise, carbon emissions and air pollution for local communities, something that they are encouraged in by government and local authorities.
“These charges help airports and airlines to keep the cost of air travel down, enabling its benefits to be enjoyed by as many people as possible and increasing tourism, trade and business.”
In short, the days when you had time to go and properly welcome your loved ones or business associates inside the arrivals hall is long gone. It’s all an anxious-riddled race these days.
The best advice is don’t go anywhere near either airports’ pick up or drop off areas – either paid or unpaid – until you know your passengers have landed, are through passport control and have picked up their luggage.
Finding a place near either airport to sit and wait for that call can be a challenge in itself with all the threats not to park or wait anywhere so you’ll need to find somewhere well away from the airport to wait until it’s time for that happy reunion amid the stress of an airport pick-up.
Yes, don’t forget that every second counts when it comes to fleecing car drivers from as much as possible.
Anyway, happy holidays.
Written by ANDY HIRST who runs his own Yorkshire freelance journalism agency AH! PR (https://ah-pr.com/) specialising in press releases, blogging, website content, copywriting and ghost-writing autobiographies.
