Picture this. You’re on vacation in Orlando with your partner and two young kids. You’ve spent a fortune on air fare, hotel stays, and theme park tickets, and the plane ride has already sapped all of the energy you’ve set aside today. Maybe you’re going to the business meeting of your life in town and need to get some rest before the big sit down.
You arrive at Orlando International Airport or MCO, you ride the tram where a monotone and unexcited voice welcomes you to Orlando. You survive the scrum at the baggage terminal and expect the worse to be behind you when you walk out the doors to meet your rideshare.
Chaos. Absolute Chaos.
The wait for your Uber or Lyft is so long that they don’t even have driver details for you yet. There are hundreds of others waiting on all sides of you as cars slide into the staging lanes almost running into luggage, other cars, and even a person. There are so many cars that need to get in, that the ones that are ready to leave, can’t. Making it all worse are drivers taking up needed space, and their riders are nowhere to be seen.
And this isn’t five or six o’clock in the afternoon. It’s 1 in the morning. That’s when the photo on this post was taken. Its happens all of the time.
This is the ridesharing reality at the Orlando International Airport. Which is governed by a self absorbed board that forgot to install moving walkways in its palatial new terminal, making travelers march half a mile (story HERE) and has had a culture of problematic leadership (story HERE) in recent years.
They even had a fire at Burger King (story HERE).
Of course they weren’t going to get this right. I mean, once they’ve got you here, you’re stuck.
For a tourism travel hub as important as this one, you would think they would do better. They haven’t.
And it’s a terrible opening handshake for anyone coming to Orlando for the first time. If you’re planning on taking an Uber or LYFT at OIA aka MCO, plan ahead. Madness awaits. An unbelievably real and terrible way to start a trip.