New Apps for the Airport Promise to Feed Time-Crunched Travelers Fast
Photo Credit: Grab is one of two mobile apps that lets airline passengers order food ahead of time at busy airports. The company has focused on pick-up orders, but it's expanding into delivery. Grab
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If this works at scale, it'll be appreciated by travelers in hub airports, where there's often not enough time to grab food between flights. But reliably delivering food to passengers waiting at gates is logistically difficult, if not impossible. We'll see if these new services can pull it off.
If you fly often —at least in the United States — you may have noticed you're spending less time waiting for connecting flights. That's because several airlines have tweaked schedules at big hubs, including Chicago and Dallas, to allow connecting passengers to seamlessly move from one flight to the next.
Once, passengers might have waited a couple of hours, but now they might spend as little as 30 or 45 minutes in the terminal. For airlines, the benefit is obvious, since — as the old saying goes — airplanes only make money in the air. And travelers benefit too, since few enjoy waiting in crowded airports.
Still, there's a problem. With little time between flights, passengers often cannot buy lunch, dinner or snacks. Airport restaurants try to handle rushes between banks of flights — it helps that they know when the big lines will come each day — but it's not easy. Many now sell more grab-and-go food than a few years ago.
But this is the age of mobile phone applicat
