Most of us have been in a situation where-where we’ve been stranded in an airport for one reason or another. Whether it is due to a cancellation or an overbooked flight, sometimes you may end up in the airport with at least a few hours before your next flight, making it not worthy of booking a hotel for an overnight stay. If there are only 5 hours between your flights, by the time you’ve found a hotel, booked a taxi, checked in, you’ll be lucky to grab a couple of hours sleep before having to return.
So, what do you do if it’s late and the next flight is next morning? You take a quick nap in departures. Sadly, if you’re flying from Stansted airport or using the airport to change flights, from now on you won’t be able to rest whilst waiting for your next flight.
In order to battle ‘airport homelessness’, which we didn’t even know was a thing, the airport is taking steps to stop people from sleeping in the terminal. For instance, once the last flight of the day has departed, the airport will be closing the airside terminals at midnight. So no staying overnight until your next flight. But what is even more shocking or surprising is that sleeping passengers, during any time of the day will be woken up by special monitoring staff after only 10 minutes. We do wonder wouldn’t these Stansted employees be better deployed elsewhere?
According to Stansted airport officials, the main reason for this is due to the fact that they get over 600 passengers sleeping within the airport every night, making it almost impossible for the cleaning staff to prep departures before the next day. From now on, departures will be closed completely from midnight through 2am.
To make sure you do not fall asleep for long, a loudspeaker will warn you that “departing passengers travelling on early morning flights should not arrive sooner than their scheduled check-in time.” In addition to this, they also have warned people not to lay across on the benches as well, which is understandable as a sleeping adult can easily take up 4 seats.
There seems to be a slight method to the madness from Stansted airport, in so much that, they do not want 500+ people staying overnight on purpose in order for them to catch their early flight and save money paying for a hotel. But the real craziness is the snooze patrol and waking passengers up after 10 minutes of snoozing. Better get drawing some eyes on our eyelids!
It’s also worth noting that Stansted has officially banned bedding, the use of camp beds, sleeping bags and other portable sleeping aids.
For more information, head to the Stansted airport website.
