Stranded

Inc.'s Road Warrior lists the country's three best airports for a business traveler to be delayed in. He describes the workstations, business services, laptop compatibility, and bookstores.

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Road Warrior

When all that stands between you and your flight home is a three-plus-hour delay, where you get stuck becomes very important

I'm stuck in Detroit's Metro Airport. The air-conditioning vent of the plane that was supposed to whisk me home to Boston is spewing hot air, which is worrisome. Even more worrisome is the fact that I've got several hours to kill in the airport while the thing's being fixed.

It's not a pretty sight. The building is old. The corridors are narrow. The gates are cramped. Outside of the airline membership lounges (which cost $100 to $500 apiece a year for typically no more than a comfortable couch and a free beverage), there's no place for a road warrior to get work done comfortably. There are electrical outlets along the corridor walls, but to use them you have to plunk yourself down in the middle of foot traffic. There are no tables or flat surfaces on which to set your laptop or, God forbid, spread out materials. And the phones? Forget it.

The only phone with a data jack, which I need to send and retrieve E-mail, is on a pole in the middle of a waiting area. There's no shelf, so I have to plug one end of the data cord into the phone, the other into my laptop, and crouch down--balancing the computer on my lap. There are three other phones around this pole, each with a business traveler going through similar contortions. One balances her laptop like a food tray on her left hand while she stands at the phone. Another squeezes his computer bag up against the bottom of the phone to create a flat surface on which to rest his laptop. The fourth gives up entirely: he's carting around a suit bag, a computer bag, and a laptop and can't figure out a way to balance everything and key in data at the same time.

Detroit Metro is a dismal place for the road warrior. But unfortunately, it's not alone. Rare is the airport that's designed for the business traveler on the go, the guy with deadlines to meet whose world doesn't stop because the tarmac is too slick or too frosty. On-time arrival rates for the major airlines range from just 72% to 85%, so all too often we're left all booted up with nowhere to go. You'd think that with close to 280 million business customers a year, the folks in charge could do better.

Well, some of them have. After weeks of extensive research and totally subjective analysis, I've come up with a list of the three best airports to get stuck in in America. My methodology was straightforward: I recollected my travels. I asked around. I posted E-mail messages on newsgroups and bulletin boards soliciting suggestions (see Resources). Then I went on a tour of the airports my sources said were the best.

Now, each traveler has his or her own criteria for what makes a way station workable. Mine are relatively simple--a telephone with a data jack, a table or a workstation on which to place my laptop and take notes while using the phone and the data jack, and a newsstand. While there are other features that make the wait more bearable (a good cup of coffee, a bookstore, an ATM), those are the essentials. To narrow the list, I added two less personal criteria: the airport had to be in a city that's a hot spot for business activity, and the facilities for business travelers had to have been in place for at least a year so I knew they had staying power. Herewith, in ascending order (from my third favorite to first), is the dope:

Seattle-Tacoma (SEA-TAC) International Airport, on the C concourse (SEA by C1, to seasoned travelers on the Internet). Here, Horizon Air and U.S. West have set up a so-called Business Center: eight workstation cubicles, each with a desk, a data jack, an outlet, and a tabletop pay phone that you can use to make toll-free, credit-card, or phone-card calls. The cubicles have a ruglike finish, which nicely complements their overall plastic feel, and they're situated in a way that allows you to watch arriving and departing flights through the plate-glass windows--a nice touch. The data jack and the phone work flawlessly. There are a couple of newsstands nearby, as well as a few restaurants and snack bars, a fax machine that doubles as a copy machine (75¢ a page/copy), a fee-for-service neck-and-back-massage area (this is Seattle, after all), and a Starbucks coffee stand, which isn't really necessary because Horizon is offering free cups of Starbucks coffee near gate C2, my point of departure.

As far as I can tell, no one checks which airline you're on when you use the Business Center or drink the free coffee, both of which I do with reckless abandon. There's no ATM in the C concourse; for that you have to go out to the main terminal. Otherwise, everything's here for you to build your own little temporary office space, which I also do with reckless abandon. If you tire of the workstations, the C area has pay phones you can plug your computer into, but as with Detroit, there's no place to sit down or set your computer when you use those phones.

New York's LaGuardia Airport, Marine Air Terminal (the Delta Shuttle waiting area; LGA/Marine by 6). Ironically, my second-favorite airport to get stuck in is one in which I've never been stuck for more than an hour because the flights leave so frequently. Bigger and cushier than Seattle's C1 accommodations, the Delta waiting area has ample seating on soft quasi-leather chairs and couches, plus numerous end tables that have tabletop pay phones (like Seattle's) with data jacks installed. There are no workstations here, but there's plenty of room on the side tables or soft couches to spread out work. There's a small bar where you can get free coffee and juice from 5:30 to 10:30 a.m. and buy snacks and sandwiches until 10:30 p.m. A closed-off area, called the Frequent Flyer Club, has more chairs and pay phones with data jacks, as well as a conference room you can reserve. The club, which also serves coffee gratis, from 6 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., is free to all Delta Shuttle passengers. The newsstands are outside the waiting area, but there are dozens of newspapers and magazines for the taking on shelves right near the gates--another feature that pushes LaGuardia ahead of Seattle for me.

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