The return of the low cost terminal as Warsaw’s Chopin Airport seeks ways to ‘divide’ traffic

In the period from the late 1990s to the mid-2010s low cost airports and terminals were popular throughout Europe, and to a lesser degree in Asia Pacific (and nowhere else).

They arose as a direct consequence of the very rapid rise in the number of low cost airlines and the new routes they began to fly, and were demanded by the management of those airlines to keep their costs as low as possible.

Then they began to die out (although many of the original terminals remain today) as a result of the hybrid nature of airlines, who moved towards each other in their operational level expectations - and that was reflected in terminal design.

Now Warsaw's Chopin Airport may get a new budget terminal, the first for quite a while in Europe, to help solve a specific capacity issue. The funny thing is that it had one before now, a building which also saw service as a supermarket and furniture store.