What's Gatwick been like the last few days?

[GlomOfNit]

We're flying tomorrow afternoon. We have a very autistic 11 yo who can't really cope well with lots of queueing and previous airport experiences, we've been able to hop a bit of that because of his lanyard/obvious issues.

Gatwick appeared to be managing the workforce shortages better than Heathrow by honing down flights with good notice. As far as we know, ours isn't affected. But what are concourses like, queues etc?

Flew home from there last Thursday. No major issues other than a 45 min delay until we got on the plane and had to wait for over an hour for the baggage handlers to get to us to load the luggage. Seems to be a lack of baggage handlers. Security very quick. Lots of restaurants etc

Not flown from Gatwick for a long time but just landed there this morning. From plane touching down to the train station in under 30 minutes. That was hand luggage only, but basically the passport queues were very short. I think bags were taking a little longer but there were no piles of suitcases or lots of people waiting for hours. Maybe later in the day is worse, I don’t know…

Last Wednesday (though v early) the queue for easyJet bag drop was about twenty minutes. Security was fine but the queues for food on the other side were horrendous. I guess everyone had got there in plenty of time and wanted to buy breakfast!
I hope everything goes smoothly for you.

Flew from there yesterday and it was all fine. It was busy in departure lounge but nothing unusual. Plenty of sandwiches etc to buy. Only problem we encountered was there was only the No1 lounge open and that was full and wouldn't take walk ins.

V early this morning 50 mins from drop off at the curb to airside hand luggage only

thanks all.
In the end it was a bit nerve-wracking, as there were climate protests on the M25 which did slow our approach, and then when we got to the terminal a shade under 2 hours before the flight (in other words, pretty much on time in normal years) the check-in queues were immense and moving very slowly - lack of staff I think. Plus a few problem cases ahead of us.

We also had a snafu in security owing to a pair of ear defenders which have never caused issues before (they usually just take them through the small x-ray machine while DS wails for 30 seconds and give them back to him) but anyway, after that we were extremely late for our gate, which seemed to be the opposite end of the universe (god I hate Gatwick!) and we literally ran all the way. I've never rushed through an airport so fast! Then, owing to the same staff shortages, there was the same big bottleneck at the actual gate. 😂But technically we arrived at the gate about 15 minutes after it should have closed.

So I'd say, leave a lot longer than 2 hours. We tried to and really felt the loss of that extra time.