Tips for navigating airports in the era of COVID-19

There was a time when you could sashay through a sleek modernist airport, stroll onto the tarmac like Greta Garbo, and minutes later be boarding your plane without a single frown appearing beneath your raffish trilby or pillbox hat.

Unfortunately, airports have become fraught since the 1930s. Romance has flown and airports are dreary obstacle courses of snaking queues, security checkpoints and grim Kafkaesque corridors. And that was before COVID-19.

Navigating an airport without stress in the coronavirus era requires a law degree and steel-trap mind to prepare the right paperwork. The first tip on staying sane? Do your homework. Your smooth transit depends on your nationality, destination, COVID-19 tests, latest Delphic government utterance, and whether you're Professor Plum in the library with a candlestick.

Good preparation is the key. Read the small print. Read the large print. Read online what the airline, transit airport and arrival airport have to say. Then do it all over again the day before you depart. It might help to sacrifice a small goat and study its entrails.

Get to the airport early. It will reduce your stress levels as you join various check-in and bureaucratic queues. Bring that unfinished memoir or model ship with you and finish it off as you wait. Learn Chinese. You might as well take advantage of your time as you hunker in a socially distanced terminal corner awaiting your boarding call.

Keep carry-on luggage to a minimum. At transit and arrival airports you'll have lots of documents to present, and you'll need your hands free. Join left lanes wherever you can. Right-handed people preference right lanes, so they're always longer.

Red and green lanes are no longer about goods to declare. Wander down a red lane these days and you might well fall through a trapdoor straight into a quarantine hotel, where you'll have to survive on Friends reruns and prank food for two weeks.

The gurus say that you can confront anxiety by envisaging the worst that can happen and then realising it isn't so bad. So what if you're held up at a checkpoint and asked for a QR code? The world won't end. Just think about the life of a refugee, and be happy you're able to shuffle slowly onwards in the queue. With that thought, staying sane in an airport is easy. Besides, life will throw up far worse things to worry about. Enjoy.

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