Photo credit: Les Chatfield
I like to see news stories which make me go, “Eh?” and I saw one this week which made we make a small, strange noise not unlike this.
It is a few years since I left me car in an airport car park. However, this week I discovered that it is sometimes cheaper to park a plane at an airport than a car. Eh? See, you are doing it as well now.
Ten of the UK’s most popular airports were surveyed and the most expensive place to park (a car) was at Heathrow Terminal 5, where over 50 quid is needed to leave your car there for a day and the one of the cheapest in the study was Edinburgh, where £23.50 is the cost of parking.
Cheese and Biscuits in the Business Lounge
I used to travel a lot from Edinburgh Airport but as I did it for business purposes I would always go there in taxi, before eating myself to a standstill in the VIP business lounge and wondering what expensive lunch I was going to claim on expenses that day. Still, it seems that the taxi cost a bit less than the airport parking, so I was probably saving the company money in the long run, unlike those fiendish colleagues who would selfishly drive to the airport in their own cars.
Ah, but if I had been a really conscientious employee who didn’t fritter away company cash on three courses lunches and frivolous taxi rides I would have flown to the airport and left my plane there. This would only have cost £11.90 a day for a small craft. Even more bizarrely, in the John Lennon Airport in Liverpool you can park a light aircraft for a little over a tenner, while car parking costs almost as 4 times as much. It’s enough to make you think that the world has gone mad and that it might be time to try and get a pilot’s license.