After suffering the mundane gloom of an airport delay, imagine being able to travel to your boarding gate via a huge slide.
Bar the mandatory Wetherspoons pints – morning, noon and night – airports can be a fairly boring place, designed to rattle your bank account with £4 Toblerones and duty-free treats you don’t need.
But at Changi Airport in Singapore, you can liven up your holiday by revisiting your childhood.
Check out the clip below:
The winner of the world’s best airport for seven years running (as per Skytrax), Changi Airport doesn’t mess about – stunning architecture, a large range of shops and eateries, and, of course, a slide to your terminal.
Yusuf El Askary was at Terminal Four of the Singapore airport on June 8 this year when he found the slide.
The video shows the 28-year-old pharmacist having a look around the airport before arriving at the slide.
To gain entry to the slide, you need your boarding pass and must spend $10 at any restaurant or retail shop in Changi Airport – considering how much money you unwittingly spend in airports, this seems remarkably easy.
As he barrels down the tube, he lets out screams of excitement and joy at a high speed before landing in front of the airport’s famous ‘red chandelier’, a large playground with climbing nets and sliding poles – unveiled in 2018 – capable of taking 50 people at any one time.
El Askary said:
I had never seen anything like it at an airport, I couldn’t believe it was true until I actually tried it.
Amazingly, this isn’t the only slide in the airport. Dubbed ‘the world’s tallest slide within an airport’, it’s located in Terminal Three. At around 12 metres high, The Slide@T3 spans four stories that run from Level One to Basement Three.
Asia dominated the global airport rankings, taking Skytrax’s top six spots.
Speaking earlier this year about earning the number one accolade, Lee Seow Hiang, Changi Airport Group CEO, said in a statement:
We thank our passengers for their continued support. Their vote of confidence motivates us in our pursuit of service excellence and pushes us to continue redefining what an airport can be.
As per Business Insider, Skytrax CEO Edward Plaisted added that ‘to be voted the World’s Best Airport for the seventh consecutive year is a truly fabulous achievement for Changi Airport, and this award continues to underline the airport’s popularity with international air travellers’.
Escalators will always look boring now – I bet nobody is late for boarding when there’s a slide in play.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.