Ever feel like that sometimes a little more thought in design would help?
My ire is directed at my main transit stop on this trip – Hamad International Airport in Doha.
Nice bear – shame about the airport (also: not a dot of real fur on it)
Getting off the A350 is a simple as there is separation straight away for arriving passengers into Doha and for Transit Passengers.
Transit passengers who needed onward boarding passes were directed to the main transit area. For once this applied to me, as I would need get my stopover voucher for a hotel.
Alas, where the A350 I arrived docked (Gate A1), Transit passengers were directed into the main terminal… which is good for a lot of reasons. Bad if you want to find the transit desk.
And is there a single signpost for the transit desk airside?
What do you think? Of course not.
Thus 30 minutes was wasted trying to find the transit area. And after a lot of asking, I finally found where to go.
For those who want to save themselves the effort here’s a map, and circled in it is where to go.
The bits in red are where you need to head to – head to the elevators beyond the escalators – Map – Hamad Airport International
A big note: The escalators are programmed to go down only. You will need to take an elevator to get to the transit area.
However, the pain doesn’t stop there. Because once you’ve found it, you’ve got to find a person to let you through the wrong way through a body scanner.
Once you’ve done that, and your luck has held you’ll be able to reach the hallowed transfer desks… and get your hotel room (of course, you’ll need to enter Qatar. On the plus side with the Hotel transit offer, you don’t have to pay a visa entry fee).
To say it’s convoluted would be an understatement, and the airport could do with clearer signage – rather than allowing customers to be lost in its duty free section (which seems to be the point of Hamad International Airport if I’m honest…)
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Well at least you were given the right directions. See what happened during my transit at Doha at the end of my flight review here: https://mrmysteryreviewer.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/flight-singapore-to-doha-with-qatarairways-dreamliner-and-stay-oryxrotana-hotel/ where I ended up paying for the visa entry myself. And then what happened the following day when I tried to get it reimbursed by Qatar the following day at the end of my review here: https://mrmysteryreviewer.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/from-doha-to-istanbul-with-qatarairways/
Strange, when I transited DOH in December, flying GRU-DOH-JNB, I got to the transit area through an arrivals corridor – I didn’t get access to the departures area until I had my onward boarding pass, gone through security, and down those escalators…
I have this nasty feeling our plane arriving from Frankfurt was docked into the wrong gate…. And they couldn’t work out how to process us.
All very bizzare.