Adding on too, the pandemic-era increase in the airport enshittification experience.
Airports have restaurants and services, then the pandemic starts, and of course, a whole bunch of them close. Now a few years have passed, those services have more limited hours, and some never came back. It is much more difficult (and of course, expensive) to have access to services in airports than pre-2020. I’ve been through several hubs recently and it’s just flabbergasting how terrible it is to even try and find something basic like food.
Airline passengers are a captive audience trapped in an airport, especially during connecting flights. Airlines/airports should bear the cost of ensuring services are available any time flights are. They should bear the cost of keeping restaurants open later than 5PM. A quantity of airport services matching the passenger load should be available at flight times in respective terminals.
It’s easy to figure out, they know the manifests and schedules.
They should also have some sort of fallback process in place for when flights get trapped overnight in airports to take care of the passengers. It doesn’t need to be a free service, but at least doing something like: on call employees come in to run shops so passengers can buy goods.