The Crowds Of Visitors Are Gone

[Soju]

Last Sunday, I arrived at Suvarnabhumi to find masses of people everywhere, caused by huge numbers of visitors coming to see the new airport. Today, exactly one week later I revisited Suvarnabhumi at the exact same time and only a fraction of the visitors are here today as were here last week. I'd estimate the number of visitors to be less than 50% of the number of passengers, whereas last week the number of visitors to have exceeded the number of passengers. In general, navigating through the airport was not a problem today. The only problem was the international arrival area which nearly everyone arriving at anytime of day has reported is a big problem. The domestic arrival area was not crowded and was no problem getting out quickly.

The number of visitors at the airport is still much higher than normal for Don Muang or any other airport, but I didn't really see it as being much of a problem today, and especially being that the numbers will likely dwindle as the weeks go by.

Today the airport was much cleaner in my opinion. They had one of those motorized sweepers passing back and forth in the departure hall and I didn't see any litter or spills on the floor today which were very obvious last week. I visited a restroom on the arrival level. It was busy, but no line. I didn't notice any unusual odor and wasn't particularly dirty even with getting heavy use. There was a cleaning girl standing outside the restroom, whom I imagine is assigned to clean the restroom at some regular interval.

I saw no long lines at check-in, and it didn't look like there were any major problems with baggage handling as there wasn't an excessive number of people waiting in the domestic baggage claim area.

Arriving on a THAI flight, the aircraft parked at a remote parking stand and it took 25 minutes from touch-down to arrive at the gate, most of that time spent standing on a very hot and crowded bus. There seems to be a technical or operations problem with the contact gates as there were a number of free gates at that time. The THAI flight manager said that they expect to solve the problem soon, and that it was an airport operations problem, not a THAI specific problem.