I haven’t had the chance to visit the airport – or this swanky lounge – in person, but reader Orit Rindner has:

“I ate a full lunch and a full dinner (5 hour layover), had a shower and then they gave me a room to rest in. I would give it a 10. I even took a pic of the ladies room… Even the doors of the stalls were teak and I think and they had a woman clean each toilet every time somebody came out of it and fold the toilet paper like they do in hotels!”

Thanks so much Orit! And thanks for sharing the view of that first-class loo.

Located in the International Departures section of the airport and capable of accommodating more that 2,000 passengers daily, the lounge has private relaxation rooms, showers, a playroom, private infant rooms, a billiard lounge, a library, and a business center.

The lounge is accessible to Turkish Airlines’ business class passengers, Miles&Smiles Elite, Elite Plus card holders and Star Alliance Gold membership card holders.

Checking my wallet for the right card now…

The lounge seems enticing, but keep in mind that Turkish Airlines also offer free tours of Istanbul to anyone with a layover of a least six hours.

Baklava, anyone?

Would you willingly spend your days stuck at the airport?

Dr. Damian O’Doherty did. For a year. I tracked him down for my “At the Airport” column on USATODAY.com. Here’s the story.

Dr. Damian O’Doherty has promised his wife that by June 30^th, he’ll stop hanging around Manchester Airport.

The facility, which bills itself as “The big friendly airport in the North of England,” has undergone $135 million in improvements since 2007 and offers free Wi-Fi, a children’s play area, a tour-able Concorde in an aviation park overlooking the runways, and a day lounge with a giant track for playing the popular Scalextric car racing game.

Those amenities are appealing, but it’s the more mundane aspects of the airport that attract O’Doherty.

The 43-year old professor teaches organization analysis at the University of Manchester and, armed with a research grant, he’s spent this past year embedded at Manchester airport. His goal: to study the everyday habits of airport workers and passengers and the impact of the airport environment on staff and travelers.

“I wanted to take the idea of an ethnographic study from the traditions of anthropology and deploy this as an experiment to study airport ‘natives’ and their culture,” says O’Doherty, who lives 30 minutes from the airport rides his bike there and back.

For inspiration O’Doherty says he looked to the Chicago School of sociological ethnography, pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s, “in which scholars would inhabit street corners, taxi-dance halls, gangs and ghettos in ways that would challenge our assumptions about the society we take for granted.”

O’Doherty says his wife, an anthropologist, was both supportive of his project “and relieved that I was not going off to Siberia or the New York underground system – both popular sites for contemporary ethnographic study.”

Still, O’Doherty’s year-long study did pose some dangers. Although he insists he hasn’t “gone native” – a common concern with those embarking on anthropological studies – his daughter’s first word was “airport” and he has extended his project year by a few months. And while he has returned to his post and his students at the university, O’Doherty is still spending two or three days a week at the airport.

Borders and boundaries

Via email and a long Skype conversation that took him away from reading a bedtime story to his young daughter, O’Doherty shared some of the details of his year at the airport.

“It is the questions of borders and border-crossing that really interests me,” said O’Doherty. “Airports occupy and define a whole series of borders. Not simply the borders of a nation state but also borders between the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial. They are where land turns into sky, and man’s dream of flight finds realization.”
At ground level, O’Doherty said he wanted to see how an airport was constructed and managed, “who was pulling the strings behind the scenes, installing the security cameras,” and making the decisions. “I wanted the back stories,” said O’Doherty, “So I ended up working in an office with a team of construction project managers for whom the airport is a building site.”

Arriving with an academic background, O’Doherty knew little about construction or project management before starting his study of the airport. But because he was strictly observing the protocols of ethnographic research, he decided he had to acquire professional qualification as a project manager. So in addition to spending many evenings in the terminal building, “sometimes becoming confused whether it was day or night,” O’Doherty also spent time studying for the exams in project management, which he did pass.

O’Doherty found that the airport experience not only warped time but, at times, space. “As you get to travel behind the scenes, stepping out of the public concourse and into a ‘staff only’ area can be a little like that experience that Alice had when she stepped into her rabbit hole!” said O’Doherty. And while he agrees with that saying about an airport being the front door to a city, his observations have led him to consider an airport a city’s back door as well.

Life at the airport

During his year at the airport, O’Doherty made note of daily timetables, seasonal rhythms and patterns, and the wide variety of operational and maintenance procedures. He also observed the push and pull of passenger movements through the terminals, an experience he discovered is a closely studied and often highly managed sequence of routines.

O’Doherty spent time with the airport chaplains, who described themselves as “the conscience of the airport,” as they tried to aid distressed and emotional passengers. And he got to know Olly, a stray cat adopted, and now extremely pampered, by the airport administration. “It always struck me as slightly odd that when I would walk to the office of the senior management sitting outside would be a rather rotund, elderly, ginger cat,” said O’Doherty.

Now, as June 30^th approaches, O’Doherty is getting ready to leave the airport routine and begin the task of turning thousands of pages of notes into a book. So far, he says can’t really generalize about air travelers and their behavior, but that “passengers do share a strange paradoxical condition of imprisonment and liberation.”

For its part, the staff at the Manchester Airport is anxiously awaiting O’Doherty’s findings.

“He managed to be here through all sorts of experiences, such as the inaugural Emirates A380 flight last year and our battles with ash clouds and snow,” notes John Greenway of the Manchester Airports Group. “So he’s really seen all sides of the airport and the nature of working in the aviation industry.”

The first Airspace Lounge opens today, May 7, 2011 on Concourse D at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport.

It’s the first in what may be a line of new all-access airport lounges around the country.

Memberships will be available; daily passes will start at $17.50.

Included will be food, snacks, coffee, tea, soft drinks, wireless internet, plenty of power outlets and the use of MacBooks and Windows PCs. Drinks from the bar will be extra.

That all sounds pretty straightforward.

But here’s an interesting twist: while the basic rate for a day pass will be $17.50,  the price of the pass “will rise from time to time to prevent overcrowding.”

“A customer who spends $17.50 and walks into an overcrowded lounge that is more chaotic than the concourse would probably not return to an Airspace Lounge; we want to prevent that from happening,” said Anthony Tangorra, chief executive officer of Airspace Lounge.

Rather than simply turn people away, the price of a day pass will fluctuate, increasing up to perhaps $40 during busy periods.

“Our day pass price will be on prominent display via LCD signage outside of the lounge,” said Tangorra.

But sometimes it can be hard to decide if shelling out $35 or more for the privilege is worth it.

3,000 lucky travelers passing through Toronto Pearson International Airport this week won’t have to weigh the options. The airport is participating in Facebook Deals and offering 1,000 daily Toronto Pearson Facebook users free access to the Plaza Premium Lounges at the airport. The 72-hour promotion lasts through February 2, 2011.

To claim your pass (worth $35) check‐in to Toronto Pearson on Facebook. If you’re among the first 1,000 to log on each day, you’ll get a pass you can show at one of the five Plaza Premium Lounges and enjoy food, beverages, showers, internet, business services, newspapers, magazines and TV.

My At the Airport column for USAToday.com this month, Coming soon – if you’re lucky – to an airport near you, features some of the new amenities I saw on exhibit in Philadelphia at the recent conference of Airports Council International – North America, or ACI-NA.

During the conference, workshops were offered on everything from saving energy to dealing with security threats and how to get more passengers to “follow” airports on Twitter.  But the real fun was on the exhibition hall floor. There, vendors displayed everything from the latest in airport seating (cup holders and USB plugs, thankfully, seem to be the next big thing) to new, high-tech machinery for shooing wildlife off runways.  But here are the amenities I found most intriguing.

Napping nooks

Last year, Minute Suites debuted “sleep rooms” at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (Concourse B, next to Gate B15).  Each room has a day bed, work desk, complimentary Wi-Fi, a 32” HDTV, and sound masking system tools. The company is opening another branch at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) in March 2011, and is in talks with at least three other airports for more.

Minute Suites airport sleep room

Unique Retreat, another company making napping nooks, should be opening its first branch at San Francisco International Airport before the end of the year in the International Terminal, Boarding Area A.

Cigar lounges

Bahamas-based Graycliff cigars opened boutiques with specially-ventilated cigar lounges attached at Nassau International Airport last November and at Nashville International Airport in March.

Each lounge has an admission fee ($10 in Nassau; $4 in Nashville) and Graycliff reps say they’re exploring setting up this type of smoking lounge at other airports as well.

Eat, buy, play

The Food Network is bidding on several airport locations for themed restaurants that will be called Food Network Kitchens.  And ZoomSystems, which makes those oversized airport vending machines (officially: “automated shops”) to sell products from Best Buy, The Body Shop, Sephora and other retailers will soon be installing airport ZoomShops to dispense apparel associated with a major sport.

Skip the cellphone lot; park at the plaza

“Cell phone lots on steroids” is how the folks at Airport Plazas are marketing the service centers they’re planning to build  on airport properties but separate from the terminals. Patterned after highway plazas offering fuel and food, these 24-hour service centers might have amenities ranging from a gas station, a food court, a car wash and a convenience store to free Wi-Fi, a pet hotel, a pharmacy and a bank.

The company opened its first airport plaza recently at Newark Liberty International Airport. There, amenities include an environmentally-friendly gas station, a dual-bay car wash, a service station bay and a 7-Eleven convenience store.

Future airport plazas are planned for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Southwest Florida International Airport (Fort Myers) and Utah’s, St. George Municipal Airport.

Sound promising?  What should they work on next?

One amenity that didn’t make it into the story is self-service ice-cream sundae machine at Boston Logan International Airport.

We all scream for ice-cream at the airport

Using a touchscreen, customers choose a flavor (12 are available) and a mix-in. The machine then prepares and delivers the dessert.  Boston Logan Airport has two  MooBella machines installed: one is at Terminal C at the Back Bay Café (Gates 11-21); the other is at Lean & Green (Gates 40-42).

If you test it out, please send a report – and a photo.

What else is fresh and new at airports this summer?

Mimes among the entertainment at PHL this summer

Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) now has free wireless and a Passenger Chillin’ Zone with sofas, tables, chairs, ottomans and foliage (Gate D-3). Throughout the summer, PHL is also hosting a Just Plane Fun program with live music, appearances by mascots from local sports teams, contests and other activities.

From now through the end of August, Miami International Airport is throwing weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) parties with a different theme each week. This weekend’s theme is Havana Nights, with domino tables, mojito demonstrations, a DJ, rumba dancing and cigar rolling.  August 20-23 you’ll find a flamenco dance show, Latin food sampling and more.

Observation Deck at LAX now open on weekends

At Los Angeles International Airport, the outdoor observation deck on top of the Theme Building in the center of the airport is finally open. Closed since 9/11, and during the building’s $12.3 million renovation and earthquake retrofit, the deck is open weekends, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., with free telescopes offering great views of arriving and departing aircraft, the airport grounds and the surrounding area. Pink’s, an iconic Hollywood hot dog stand, has also opened a branch in the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

At Outagamie County Regional Airport (ATW) in Appleton, Wisconsin, they’re still lining up to get candy from the giant purple machine with flashing lights.

Willy Wonka candy machine dispenses mixed candy treats

Located pre-security, the Willy Wonka candy machine is one of 25 such machines in the country (there’s one at the Mall of America) and is currently the only one at an airport.

Passengers had so much fun during the special events held at Vancouver International Airport during the 2010 Winter Olympics games that the airport decided to host Take-off Fridays festivals all summer, complete with face painting, DJs spinning music, prize drawings, meal specials and frees samples from a variety of airport shops.

And San Francisco International Airport is presenting You are Hear concerts again this summer. Performances take place every Friday through August 28^th between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. at three different stages in the airport. This week the line-up includes Quinteto Latino in the International Terminal, Lavay Smith & The Red Hot Skillet Lickers in the United hub and, in Terminal 1, Threeocracy. See the SFO website for the full season schedule.

Enjoy!

The restaurant offers a “mock vacation scene” with petrified palm trees and mosaic glass tile ceiling, and a menu that includes Corona beer cheese soup, braised pork shank carnitas and other authentic Mexican dishes.

And while you’re at MIA, be sure to look around at the airport’s temporary and permanent artwork, including Teresa Camozzi’s Temporary Altars, which are mobiles made of chiffon panels in the tradition of Tibetan Thankga paintings – portable references for meditation.

Look for these in the South Terminal J, East Elevator Lobby, near Club America.

The South Terminal is also now home to two giant murals Brazilian artist Carbyé created in 1960 for the American Airlines terminal at JFK.  The murals were set to be demolished along with that JFK terminal, but were rescued, repaired and relocated at MIA.

I really like those kooky lounges. Riding on them always offers a unique view of the airport.  And there’s a black and white picture somewhere in the airport’s archives that explains the “lounge” part perfectly: it shows females attendants serving drinks to passengers on their way to the plane.

Even this photo shows travelers who seem to have no worries at all about making their connecting flights.

There are certainly some upsides to the AeroTrain.

One benefit is that right now there’s a photography exhibit in the tunnel connecting the temporary Concourse C with the C-Gates AeroTrain station.

(Photo by: Kanji Takeno)

The exhibit “Washington, DC: Through Our Eyes,” includes photos shot by members of the White House News Photographers Association. The 44 photos currently on display are just the first group of more than 200 photos that will be displayed on a rotating basis.

And,  if you find yourself with a long layover at Dulles International Airport (IAD) and have wrung all the excitement out of riding the AeroTrain and looking at the photo exhibit, then check out the cool stuff at the National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center just down the road.

The museum is big enough for the to Smithsonian to display thousands of aviation and space artifacts that just won’t fit on the National Mall.  Like the Boeing B-29 Superfortress  “Enola Gay.”

If you’re traveling through Boston’s Logan International Airport or Seattle-Tacoma International Airport today (Wed. Nov 25, 2009) look around for the “Fareologists” from Bing Travel. They’ll be answering travel questions (try to stump them by asking where the best place is to buy an extra pair of underwear) and surprising some folks (1,000 in all) in the ticketing areas by giving them a $15 card redeemable for cash anywhere MasterCard is accepted.  Nice!

If you’re at Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) Wednesday between 10 and 11 am look around for the world-famous Radio City Rockettes, who will be performing -and no doubt posing for photos with travelers – in the Baggage Claim area and at the Security Checkpoint in the Landside Terminal.

And between 8 am and 5 pm today (and on Saturday and Sunday; November 28-29, 2009) you can stop by an “Airport Privacy Haven”  in Chicago O’Hare International Airport (ORD), Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) or New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport for a free massage and complimentary Wi-Fi between 8 am and 5 pm.

Enjoy!