How to welcome visitors - make them pay for luggage trolleys with coins that they haven't got
So you arrive at a foreign airport after an overnight flight. You finally get through immigration after a long wait, and then join the scramble for bags on the carousel. Lifting them off is not easy and you're almost asleep, so you look round for the luggage trolleys.
Plenty of trolleys, all chained together and the only way you can liberate one is by inserting a coin in the local currency - which, of course, you do not yet have. You have notes in your wallet, but no coins, and none of the staff is willing to give you any change. Not much of a welcome .....
It happened to me when we arrived in the Canaries a week after the euro was introduced - and none of the people arriving had any of the new coins, of course.
But I'd always been pleased that English airports seem to be more humane and do not require coins to access the luggage trolleys. Until today, when we flew back in to Gatwick from Jamaica after a long journey with little sleep. We had English currency with us but no coins to hand. It made us feel pretty unwanted - so must give an awful message to tourists.
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We didn't have any pound coins with us, but the trolleys were dual slot - pounds and euros. Great, I thought. I've got some euro coins.
But what had Tesco done? Arranged for all the euro slots to be blocked off so you couldn't use them!
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