The short answer to “is it worth paying for premium security?” is “sometimes”.
I was innocently booking my airport parking (is Gatwick’s official parking usually half the price of Heathrow’s? Another reason to prefer flying from LGW!) when I spotted that you could upgrade to premium security for £5. I’ve never done it before but I figured for that price, I’d try it out. I was already checking in online and carrying only hand luggage so that was two queues avoided. Why not have a go at skipping the worst of them?
There were three ways this could go. Best case, general security would be chaos and I’d breeze through smugly. Second, general and premium are both chaos, like when 95% of easyJet passengers upgrade to Speedy Boarding. Or general and premium are both really quiet. I suppose it’s possible for general to be quick and premium to be chaos but I was discounting that.
I arrived. I showed my booking on my phone to the glamorous lady guarding the entrance to VIP security, scanned my boarding pass to gain entry to the actual security belts and had a look across at general security. It seemed pretty quiet. Premium security was also pretty quiet – and for the record, I got straight through with no “can you open this?”, “can you take that off?” or “have you got [x] in there?”. I’m a pro at this, guys!
So, no. At 9.45am on Friday 17th February 2023, I don’t think it was worth paying for premium security. But it’s a total gamble. Had I gone through at the “correct” time of 10.30, the situation might have been very different. Maybe 9.45 the next day, the first Saturday of half term, it might have been worth it. If I’d taken my parents and sister, it might not have been worth it – £20 extra for a shorter queue is very different from £5. If I’d been running late, it might have been worth the money for a higher chance of getting to my gate on time.
This is the shortest blog post I’ve ever written – and foolishly, I have no photos. You can’t take photos in security, so you were never going to see it but it looks like normal security. It is normal security, it’s just normal security separated off by a moveable fence.
Will I do it again? Nah. I like that it’s an option I can use if I feel like I need to but it’s not something I’m going to do as a habit in future.