Airport Review - Detroit

The Detroit Airport (DTW) has improved greatly over the last 10 years. About seven years ago I spent a day in DTW and was not really impressed. Granted, they were still building the new terminal, but it was awful; bad food choices, disgusting old seating, no heating and air, and it was very dirty.

The last time I was there, last year, things were much better. The food options were better, it was clean, the terminal was sleek and new, and they had created a crazy underground walkway with blue lights and soft music.

Yesterday, I stepped into the Detroit Airport to find a beautiful, modern, efficient airport; I was amazed and delighted. This is an airport that I could get stranded in!

The baggage claim system was well designed. The rental car bus driver was wonderful. It was an overall very good experience. There was only one thing I would change to make things better.

Remember that crazy underground walkway with lights and music? This is a wide walkway with moving sidewalks on both sides heading in opposite directions. It is a long walkway; it probably took 5-7 minutes to walk the whole thing. The walls are lined with glass panels. These panels are etched with abstract waves and flowers. There are lights behind the panels. In the past, these lights were blue and green and they shifted, oozing from blue to green as you walked by. Overhead, soothing music wafted along, matching the shifting blues and greens.

Yesterday, this walkway had changed. The lights behind the glass panels were red, blue, purple, yellow, white, and they flashed and blinked. Techno-type music blared overhead. As the lights changed from light blue to red to purple, the walkway tunnel would dim to late evening darkness and the music would quiet. The lights would then flash repeatedly, yellow and red and the music would kick back up. This happened about three times as I moved through the tunnel and if I had been epileptic, I would have been seizing on the floor one minute into the walk. Being a healthy young woman, I wasn’t as worried about the seizures as I was about the spike in my blood pressure that I experienced during the walk. I was stressed. And it wasn’t just me. My coworker, with whom I was traveling, also felt the same stress. It was really crazy. Like a bad trip or something. I think there was a guy on the moving walkway next to us experiencing a flashback; he was gazing, glassy-eyed as the lights moved by him.

I guess it makes for an exciting transition from terminal to baggage claim, but it was frankly frightening. After being stuck in a flying tin can without brakes (that’s another story for another day), a flashing, heart attack/seizure inducing hallway is the last thing a person needs to go through.