Emirates will have their own lounge so that won't impact things. BA would be 32J on 8 rows of Club but there's also Air France, Brussels Airlines and a few others to consider.

Oops sorry, thanks for pointing out the error!

From what i heard today about AY, there is a date this year when they're definitely coming across, but no lounge provision as of yet.

Proposed segregated bus route was not the best as it involved back of house corridors. Hopefully the many delays have given MAG time to either find an alternative or do what HAL did when they created the CTA arrivals corridor at T5 and make it a better customer proposition and not feel like you are going via a back door into a restricted area.

i would say it just baffles me why we are at this stage and there is still messing around with airlines delaying a move to T2 because there is no good solution - i would say it baffles me, but then this is MAN we are talking about. even setting aside the poor internal route, it would have meant bussing for all BA flights in future.

all of this would have been known several years ago when the T2 improvement planning was started, they would have known an arrivals route for UK/CTA flights would be needed. and presumably because they wanted to cut costs they have come up with this frankly dumb solution of mixing with international arrivals and using biometrics - a solution no other UK airport uses and has a serious impact on turnaround times due to the inevitable congestion which will ensue when 220 passengers queue on a jetbridge to use 2/3 biometric machines. it is a massive disappointment as there are undoubtedly things which will be much better in t2 - security, overall terminal space airside, better gate area and not boarding from a corridor etc. but due to this arrivals process, for now i am not actually unhappy the move has been delayed and BA remains in T3.

First experience arriving into T2 on IB from MAD, all very clean and new etc, immigration e gates was seconds but so much walking from the aircraft to get there, then a convoluted route to the train station, took a bit of figuring out as someone who’d never done it but appreciate the current set up may be temporary- took nearly 45 mins from landing to the train station with no luggage and no waiting.

Agree with this. The current biometric setup uses boarding passes to link with facial recognition, but how does that work when leaving the aircraft on arrival at MAN? Will passengers need to retain boarding passes (surely not?) or is a different approach going to be taken. All feels completely farcical for an airport the size of MAN.

on the bp point, i don't know. all existing systems at LHR and MAN require a bp to capture and check, so on capture it links your photo with your bp and at any subsequent check point it checks your face against the one held against your bp. i guess in theory you could have a system which didn't link to a bp, so you capture on coming off the flight and when you get to the UK/CTA channel to bypass immigration you just check whether the person matches any of the photos in the system. not sure how quick and accurate it would be tho if it is comparing against hundreds of photos vs one.

I suspect it is the former tho, which as you note means folks would have to retain a bp which they won't be used to doing and creates the problems you note.

Was this last night? We did exactly the same - could have walked you to the station except we had bags to collect! This was our 3rd T2 arrival and the walk to passport control is ridiculous. Thankfully it was straight through then head to the luggage carousel where we eventually discovered that one of our 3 bags never left Madrid 🤦🏻‍♀️. A few other families seemed to have the same issue!
MAN (outside temp 18 C) managed to still be warmer than MAD (outside temp 36 C), especially in the Skywalk 🥵

What airline lost your bag?

Don't forget though, everything done the "Manchester way" is infinitely better than anywhere else in the world.

Mild tangent - one of the security people was lecturing the queue on how we were all inflicting ridiculous secondary waiting times on ourselves (at T3), I challenged him and said "why is this only an issue at Manchester? You never get this at Heathrow or Gatwick, or anywhere else in the world".

The response was "well it is better in T2, that's where they've spent all the money, but it's old equipment in here", my reply was "I know that, so MAGs answer is blame the passenger for MAGs shortcomings then?". He nodded.

Iberia. It arrived at MAN last night according to the email I've had, but I can't track it because IB isn't listed on the Global Baggage Solutions website!

kdhurst380 - you like to live dangerously! I'm always too scared of being hauled away and missing my flight to challenge any of their nonsense 😂

Seen a couple of these Trunkies at MAN recently:

I was about to say exactly the same! I have bitten my tongue several times (although admittedly, less so in the last year or two - things are somewhat better).

I though MAG were the gold tier of airports in this forum, efficient and pioneering.