If your travel-lust or business ever leads you into or out of Australasia, you should make sure your flight makes its obligatory stop at Singapore Changi Airport ( http://www.changi.airport.com.sg/ ). This goes for one-hour "Oh lets get some gas and then leg it" stops as well as the "Sorry, there's no other flight before tomorrow" variant. In other words, if you have to be stuck on an airport, make sure you get stuck on this one.
Changi Airport is an incredibly well equipped specimen of its kind. It begins with its architecture: The airport is large and gives a feeling of spaciousness, yet it is not confusing it its size. Ways to the airplanes are short and quickly found, so you can forget the feeling of being a lab rat in a maze experiment, a notion that has crept over me more than once in airports like Frankfurt, for example. Basically the airport is one symmetrical large football-ground-sized area with a few clustered shops on it or its perimeter. All planes are along two wide arms that extend from the main area.
Service: Changi Airport is completely laid out with carpet and fully a/c'ed. Everything is in working order, and sparklingly clean. You could practically eat from the floor, and the public restrooms really deserve their name as neither you nor your nasal passages get anything but the most positive excitement.
Want anything? They have it. Restaurants are plentiful and goo and every culinary directions is there. Aside from the basics like credit card phones every airport has (although here the local calls are free AND they have modem plugs), Changi sports a whole array of new things.
There is an Internet Café (useful for Guide Researchers), an interactive science exhibition, a Cactus and an Orchid Garden, Fitness Centre, Shower & Sauna and comfy relax chairs for people who just relly need a good snooze. For the more active kind there is a free (!) tour of Singapore available.
But what is best is that Singapore recognizes you as a long-term customer. This may sound trivial, but the practical side of this is that Singapore Airport tries to behave so you want to come back. More precisely, the airport authority guarantees you that nothing you buy inside the airport is more expensive than the middle price in the city itself. You cannot be cheated on your taxi ride into the city because there is a Limousine service operating on a flat rate. And in order to attract shoppers, they don't even charge you an airport tax if your stay in Singapore is less than 48 hours.
I think a choice of other airport executives ought to be force-flown to Singapore so that they can't excuse themselves with "We didn't know sick green is unpopular as a wall paint".
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Hun
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