New era for airport named worst in Britain three times running

Plane Talk: Before you can enjoy Luton airport’s new £160m look, you first have to get there

The 1980s advertising campaign for Campari boosted sales of the aperitif, but it did Luton airport no favours.

An elegantly dressed woman, sitting on the patio of a Mediterranean villa, is asked by her admirer: “Were you truly wafted here from paradise?”.

“Nah,” she responds in glass-shattering cockney. “Luton airport.”

The Bedfordshire airport’s dismal image was lifted a decade later, when, thanks to easyJet, Luton became the British budget traveller’s window on Europe. It remains the airline’s headquarters, even though Gatwick now handles far more easyJet passengers.

Luton is also the leading UK hub for Wizz Air’s eastern European network. The Romanian carrier, Blue Air, is building an operation, with links to an odd collection of destinations including Turin and Larnaca. Ryanair has a busy schedule at the airport, and British Airways’ sister airline, Vueling, uses it for some London operations despite competing head-on with easyJet.

Yet the airport, 30 miles north of London and just off the M1, has been rated worst in Britain three years running by Which? magazine subscribers, most recently in August.

Over those three years, which coincide with the £160m building programme, I have enjoyed the travel opportunities flights that Luton offers, but not the airport experience itself. Disruption from the refurbishment made an already cramped and overcrowded terminal even busier.

But this week the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, officially opened Luton’s upgraded terminal – with its boss promising “a bigger, better airport to meet the needs of travellers to and from the south east of England”.

Nick Barton, Luton’s chief executive, told me: “We’ve been pretty much in a state of constant flux. For the first time in over three years, the change programme has ended.”

The work includes 30 new shops, including Hugo Boss, Chanel and Oliver Bonas’s first airport store. Passengers are more likely to be impressed, though, by a terminal which is 40 per cent bigger, with “better seating and vastly improved security”, according to Barton.

Before you can enjoy Luton airport’s new look, though, you first have to get there. Surface transport to the airport has always been tricky, with traffic on occasion so bad that I have seen anxious passengers baling out of taxis to walk the final mile with an implausible amount of luggage.

There is now dual carriageway access, and the airport’s bus station no longer resembles a demilitarised version of Checkpoint Charlie.

But unlike Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and even plucky Southend, Luton has no direct rail connection with central London. Passengers must instead take a bus to and from Luton Airport Parkway, a railway station that appears to have been designed to make platform access as awkward as possible.

“The real future comes in the form of the DART [Direct Air to Rail Transit], says Barton. “That will come along in March 2021.”

The DART light rail link is ferociously expensive: the 1.4-mile line from the airport to the station is costing £225m. But while passengers will still need to change to Thameslink and East Midlands Trains, the airport boss says: “You will be able to get from the terminal to central London in about 30 minutes.”

What about the repeated, stinging criticism of Luton, though?

“Every airport has its detractors,” says Mr Barton. “We look at our own passenger feedback, and it’s those that we manage our business by. The evidence is in how we’re grown.”

Luton currently claims to be London’s fastest growing airport, with nearly 17 million passengers expected in 2018. At this pace the 20 million mark may be reached within three years – partly as a result of the paralysis in expansion elsewhere in southeast England.

Progress on Heathrow’s third runway appears glacial. With Gatwick close to capacity until it unlocks the potential of its spare runway in perhaps six years, the likely growth in London aviation will be split between Luton, Stansted and Southend.

Luton airport has just marked its 80th birthday, presumably with a celebratory bottle of Campari. On your next visit, you can decide if it is finally a fair approximation to paradise.