The spread between Terminals means that staff aren't being used as efficiently as possible. I don't think we will really know how well the terminal will work for sure until October, when T5 will be running at full power.

One thing that I think increases transaction times is people not having their boarding pass already printed when they go to a Fast bag drop. Of course they're not supposed to go to a FBD without a boarding pass but its quite hard to say to someone, please go and get a BP and rejoin the 10 minute queue again.

It may sound insignificant but if a pax has a boarding pass ready printed, all the agent has to do is scan the BP and enter the number of bags being cheked in. Compare this with assigning to a particular flight (that's if the pax knows the flight number) then discussing seats and printing the BP it can easilly add 30 - 60 secs to a transaction.