You’ve probably noticed that no matter the length of your actual flight, the walk between gates, or to the baggage carousel, or to the exit just seems to be getting longer and longer. And it is.
That’s in part because airports are gaining gates and flights and passengers, and they can’t all be close together. But how much do we really walk? I’ve measured my least favorite distance, in Terminal 4 at JFK, at about 800 meters, and now I find it’s almost a piker.
Goldcar, a European car rental company that’s set up a new system to cut off part of the walk by letting you retrieve your car key from a kiosk using your phone, has put out some collected numbers on airport walking, mostly for Britons.
- Travelers walk about 1.1km, on average, every time they land or board a plane.
- Based on an average of two holiday trips a year, they say, British travelers walk 355 miles in a lifetime, just within airports. That’s about the distance from London to the Scottish border.
- It’s also longer than Spanish travelers have to foot it; they get off with only 267 miles in a lifetime.
- The most frequent travelers are likely to rack up about 3400 airport miles on foot in a lifetime…and you don’t even get loyalty points for that.
- World’s longest airport walks include the 3.2 km walk through Beijing’s Capital Interenational Airport, and Atlanta’s 2.1 km distance at Hartsfield-Jackson International.
- The U.K.’s longest airport walks are 1.8 km from Gatwick’s entrance to its North Terminal, and one of my pet hates: 1.22 km in Heathrow Terminal 5.
