Always Learning: A Day at MHT
GSAs share their experience learning more about the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport
By: Tim Adams, Southern NH University GSA Class of 2014
Do those of you who spend any time at the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport booth ever do a bit of walking around to see what might have changed within the Airport itself?
Case in point – Do you know where the ‘Ready Station’ is and what it’s used for?
Those of you that do a Walk-About will likely have seen it, especially if you walk down past the Spirit counter. It’s located on the right side, just before the Spirit counter, and is a machine that allows you to convert money into a debit card, so you don’t have to carry cash with you.
While it was out of order earlier this week, we did get asked about it at the booth on Tuesday, and so I thought I’d mention it to others. This Ready Station was put in by Spirit Airlines, so they are the ones to notify if you get told it isn’t working. I don’t know how much use it gets, but if a person wants to use it, now you will know where it is.
Also, have you ever noticed the small cylinder shaped items that have popped up on many of the different columns there at the airport? Have you walked over to them to see what they are for and how you might use them IF the need were to arise? Spend a few minutes and do so the next time you’re there at the booth. Look over at the down escalator (from the garage) from the booth and you can see one on the column just to the left, if I’m remembering correctly that is. Walk around and you will see that there are lots of them scattered about.
And do you know where all of the different baggage claim offices are? If you work in the booth, I’m sure you know where American and Southwest are, but United keeps their unclaimed baggage behind their ticket counter and Spirit has a locker down by Carousel #1 which they use. Typically, passengers will need to have the airlines paged to get somebody to help them claim their bags.
While I’m at the airport, I’m in the Information Booth most of the time I’m there, but when a plane arrives, I typically put on a badge that says ‘Ask Me’ and stand at either the top or bottom of the escalator as the passengers arrive. Most of the questions are the same, with ‘Where is a restroom?’ topping the list, followed by ‘Where is my baggage?’, ‘Where are the rental car agencies?’, ‘What’s the weather outside?’ and the like. The airport questions are typically easy to answer, but occasionally some passenger will throw a curve at you like one did to to me earlier this week.
His question was ‘In what year was the Battle of Hastings fought?” My answer was ‘I believe that would have been in 1066.” His reply got me laughing as he said, ‘You do know the answer to everything, don’t you.” How he ever got that idea from the simple ‘Ask me’ button I don’t know, but I did find it rather funny, so I thought I’d share it.
