What makes Singapore's Changi Airport so charming? - USATODAY.com

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By Harriet Baskas, special for USA TODAY

On a visit to Singapore earlier this month, I asked most everyone I met to tell me what they liked most about their island city-state. Locals sang the praises of the Lion City's food, its culture, its cleanliness and its safety. And more often than not, they told me how much they loved their airport.

Yes, their airport. Not something you're likely to hear from anyone living in Chicago, Detroit or New York City. But it seems most citizens of Singapore are sweet on Changi Airport. Given how often Changi lands on top of (or near the top of) surveys ranking airport shopping, dining, cleanliness and leisure activities, so too is the rest of the world. So I decided to set aside an afternoon to find out what makes Changi so charming.

It's not its coziness

With four gates, one security checkpoint, and about one million annual passengers, New York's White Plains Westchester County Airport is "cozy." Singapore's Changi Airport, which serves close to 40 million passengers a year, is not. It sits on about 3,200 acres of land (more than half of which has been reclaimed from the sea) and has three main terminals, a no-frills Budget Terminal, 230 retail shops, and more than 110 food and beverage outlets. The newest terminal (Terminal 3) has more than 900 skylights and a "Green Wall" that's covered in live plants and about five stories high.

So, cozy it's not. But in a hot, humid, rainy country just three and a half times the size of Washington, D.C., and with a population of close to 5 million people, cozy is not necessarily an asset. So the air-conditioned Changi airport, with its vast, bright public spaces, carefully-tended-to greenery, mall-like shopping and dining venues, and comfortable, out-the-way seating areas, has become a popular spot with locals. Many families spend their weekend afternoons shopping, dining and just hanging around at the airport and many students take their school books and head to the airport to study.

Good ambience, good value and plenty of perks

"Singapore is dense, and the airport is intentionally open and spacious, with a good ambience for both travelers and Singaporeans," Changi's corporate communications manager Lee Ching Wern explained during a walking tour of the airport. "We also want the airport to be perceived as a place of value." To that end, the airport is loaded with a wide variety of useful and, for an airport, unusual amenities.

Many airports these days offer travelers free wireless Internet access. Changi does that too, but it also provides more than 500 free Internet stations throughout the terminals, making it easy to check e-mail one last time before boarding that 10-hour flight to Japan. To help travelers while away long layovers, there are free movie theaters, free computer games, free music video and CD listening stations, and a complimentary karaoke-style music studio, where I watched two grown men turn into giggling teenagers before they even put on their headphones. Live entertainment includes "meet and greets" with celebrities passing through the airport and, just last week, a series of performances by a Michael Jackson impersonator. Numerous themed lounges offer showers, massages, meals and napping suites at very reasonable prices, but foot- and leg-massage machines scattered around the airport are free, as are the napping and lounge chairs in quiet, marked rest areas.

For my money, though, the best amenities at Changi are the tranquil koi ponds and a series of five themed gardens, all free and all exquisitely well-cared for. Indoors, there's a fern garden and an orchid garden displaying more than 15 species of the flower. Outdoors, there's a rooftop cactus garden with more than 40 species of cacti and succulents, a sunflower garden that will make you feel as if you've stepped into a Vincent van Gogh painting and, my favorite, a colorful, two-story tropical butterfly garden with more than 1,000 free-roaming butterflies native to Singapore and Malaysia. Each day, new, "just born" butterflies are released into the garden.

Little, low-cost things make a big difference

Changi Airport may be unusual in that it's got plenty of space, a hefty budget for amenities and promotions, and a mandate to make the airport an oasis for both passengers and local citizens. Few airports may be able to match Changi for the breadth and creativity of its complimentary amenities, but airports of any size can certainly take some tips from the airport's approach to customer service. During my three-hour tour of the airport my guides, higher-ups from the corporate communications division, were approached by an exhausted-looking woman wanting to know if there was a place she and her husband could go to rest during a long layover between two extremely long flights. Not only did one staff member stop to explain that there were free lounge chairs in the adjacent terminal – with built-in alarm clocks – right next to the gate for their next flight, but she insisted on walking the tired travelers to the next terminal to make sure that they found those chairs. Inexpensive, but very impressive.

Even more inexpensive and impressive: upon my initial arrival at the airport at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning, a customs and immigrations officer welcomed me with a big smile and one of the airport's complimentary breath mints.

Now that's charming!

Harriet Baskas writes about travel etiquette for MSNBC.com and is the author of the airport guidebook Stuck at the Airport and a blog of the same name. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/hbaskas.