Just back from Amsterdam where I was MC’ing the Congress at TabExpo 2019.
What a great city. I’ve been to Amsterdam once or twice before but can’t remember when exactly - the late Eighties and early Nineties, I think.
I didn’t see it at its best this week because the weather wasn’t great, which limited the opportunity to wander around without getting very wet.
On Monday night it rained so hard I thought water was leaking into my room from the floor above. But it was just the noise of the rain on my window.
I was also working most of the time but I’ll definitely go back - next year, perhaps.
One incentive is that Eurostar is launching a direct service from Amsterdam to London.
At the moment you can travel from London to Amsterdam direct, but on the return journey you have to stop and change at Brussels, which can mean a wait of up to two hours.
I don’t really enjoy flying so I considered the Eurostar option before I went to TabExpo but due to engineering works between Brussels and Amsterdam even the direct journey from London was scheduled to take six hours.
If you add an hour and 30 minutes to get to St Pancras from my house in Cambridgeshire, plus an hour going through security and waiting for the train to depart, the whole outward bound journey would have taken eight and a half hours.
In contrast, the flight from Stansted to Amsterdam was just 40 minutes. Add the one hour drive to the airport, plus the two hours at the airport prior to boarding, and the journey took four hours in total.
No contest, then. Nevertheless I will probably give Eurostar a try once the Amsterdam service goes direct in both directions.
Then again, I was impressed with Schiphol Airport. It felt clean, spacious and, on a Thursday afternoon in November, not unduly busy. There were lots of places to eat and drink, and no shortage of seats.
Smokers were pretty well catered for too. I saw several indoor ‘smoking lounges’, all well signposted. One or two were quite small and not somewhere you’d want to spend a long time, but they weren’t hidden from view, nor were they a long walk away.
Two were directly adjacent to bars, and another - which took the form of a rather impressive glass cube - was directly en route to my gate and very close to a cafe and Internet zone.
They were all in use which is why I didn’t take any photos because I felt it might be a bit intrusive. I can report however that the air filtration systems must have been working well because there was little or no sign of any smoke.
The fug that would fill poorly ventilated airport smoking rooms and the condensation that would drip down the walls 20 years ago were completely absent. Technology, eh?
Talking of which, I saw several areas where you could sit at a desk or table and plug in your laptop or iPad.
Most impressive, perhaps, were the dispensaries marked ‘toilet seat cleaner’ in the cubicles in the gents’ loo. How civilised is that?
I believe that Schiphol rivals Heathrow in terms of the number of flights and passengers but security was a breeze compared to most airports. Belt, shoes? No problem, sir, you can keep them on.
Even when I forgot to take my tube of toothpaste out of my case in order to present it as a separate item in a plastic bag, that wasn’t an issue either. Instead of redirecting my X-rayed case for a top to bottom security check, no-one even mentioned it.
In my next post I’ll write a little bit about TabExpo Congress which concluded with a session hosted by representatives of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. Interesting times.