Bad food in a plane, to a certain extent I can understand. But terrible food in airports, that just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I just can’t get my head around it. It’s as if the businesses in airports were preying on one-time only passengers: “these travelers are limited in what they can buy and they’ll probably never pass by here again, so who cares about providing them value. And while we’re at it, might as well put an insane price tag”.
That’s certainly no way of doing business. Perhaps they’ve forgotten that a good number of travelers do fly the same routes multiple times a year. Business travel is a big industry! In fact, the business travel spending in Canada from our American cousins alone totaled 1.4 billion$ in 2009(source). That’s a lot of money. Just for myself for instance I travel numerous times in the year, often passing by the same hubs, like the Vancouver airport. Well today I ate at a restaurant I wanted to try each time I passed by but never had the chance, and it was horrific. How can you get a stir-fry ginger chicken so wrong? Have they never even tried ginger chicken?
Rather than throwing poor value at high price in our faces, airport businesses could leverage the fact that travelers have little comfort and are away from home. Why not make them feel really comfortable and serve a real good meal with wonderful service. I’m not talking about fine cuisine here! Imagine the value. Imagine the growth opportunity. Imagine this restaurant quickly booming in every airport.
So who’s ready to invest a few millions on this with me? 
To all of you who are traveling right now, have a wonderful trip.
