I’m all for airport security. Genuinely — I encourage it, and I’m patient with it. But travelling internationally by plane has become a proper chore, and it’s worth walking through exactly why, because the pattern only becomes obvious once you actually add it all up.
The Journey Itself
A two-hour flight from the UK to Portugal. You’re told to be at the airport three hours before departure, even with hand luggage only, even having already checked in online. You walk through security in stages: swipe your boarding card to get into the security area, go through security itself, then you’re released into the overpriced “duty free” shopping — which, we’ll come back to, is very often nothing of the sort. Eventually you’re called to your gate, where your passport and boarding pass get checked again.
The flight will not leave from the gate originally listed. It will not depart at the scheduled time. It will, more often than not, land close enough to on time — the airline’s own delay appears to happen almost entirely on the ground, on your end, not theirs. Then you leave the aircraft, walk a genuinely long way to passport control, join the “other passports” queue now that we’re outside the EU, navigate the trial-and-error of egates versus a manual desk, walk through customs, and walk further still to find a taxi or the car rental desk. The actual flying part of a two-hour flight is now comfortably the smallest portion of the total journey time.
The Duty-Free Myth, Confirmed
That “duty free” shopping in the middle of it all isn’t the bargain it’s sold as, and this isn’t just a gut feeling — it’s been measured. An IATA-commissioned study found that nearly 64% of duty-free items were priced within 5% of their standard domestic retail equivalent, and 22% were actually priced higher than you’d pay on the high street. One OECD tax economist put it plainly: “duty-free doesn’t mean ‘discounted.’ It means ‘tax-exempt’ — and retailers are under no obligation to pass those exemptions on to consumers.” Genuine savings exist in a narrow band — tobacco and spirits, specifically when compared against heavily taxed markets like the UK — but the general “everything here is cheaper” framing the branding relies on simply isn’t true for most of what’s actually on the shelves.
The Extra Charges Keep Multiplying
Drop-off charges are the clearest example of costs creeping in around the actual ticket price. Gatwick now charges £10 for a ten-minute stop to drop someone at the terminal — double what it charged when it first introduced the fee in 2021. The UK-wide average minimum drop-off charge rose by roughly a third in a single year, from £5.30 to £7, between July 2025 and July 2026. London City, the last major UK airport to offer free drop-offs, started charging from January 2026. Compare that to continental Europe: Paris Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam Schiphol all maintain genuinely free drop-off access, absorbing the cost through other commercial revenue rather than charging the people dropping you off. This is a specifically British pattern, not an unavoidable feature of running an airport.
Airlines have layered their own charges on top for years — seat selection, priority boarding, checked bags, and at various points, a genuinely real proposal (never actually implemented) to charge for using the onboard toilet, an idea Ryanair’s CEO has floated and half-jokingly re-floated since 2009, most recently teased again as recently as this year. It’s never been real, but the fact that it keeps resurfacing, and that people half-believe it every time, tells you something about how normalised the idea of an airline charging for absolutely anything has become. There has been some regulatory pushback — Spain fined five budget airlines €180 million in late 2024 specifically over charging extra for standard hand luggage, and the EU voted in mid-2025 to require cabin bags be included free of additional charge — but the general direction of travel, in the UK specifically, has been more fees, not fewer.
Adding It All Up
None of these individual costs is enormous on its own. That’s precisely the trick. Parking or drop-off charges, food and drink priced for a captive audience, duty-free that isn’t actually discounted, seat selection and baggage fees stacked onto a headline fare that looked cheap purely because none of this was included in it, plus the sheer time cost of a three-hour-early arrival policy, long walks at both ends, and passport queues that have only gotten longer since leaving the EU. The advertised ticket price increasingly bears very little resemblance to what actually leaves your account and your day by the time you’re in a taxi at the other end.
Is Flying Becoming a Rich Person’s Activity?
I think the honest answer is: not entirely, but it’s moving steadily in that direction for anyone who can’t absorb these costs comfortably. The headline fares are still genuinely cheap — that part of the budget airline promise hasn’t been broken. What’s changed is everything wrapped around the fare: the parking, the drop-off, the food, the “discounted” shopping that isn’t, the seat you have to pay extra for if you want to sit next to the person you’re travelling with, the seemingly annual creep of yet another small charge somewhere new. For someone comfortably well-off, all of this is an irritation. For a family of four already stretching to afford the headline fare in the first place, it’s the difference between a trip that’s actually affordable and one that quietly isn’t, dressed up in a price tag that claims otherwise.
