Having traveled around through various European airports (especially Frankfurt) over the past decade....one of the little complaints that I generally have is availability and cost of H20 (water). Once you cross the line through security....you get stuck with only water via the airport staff themselves, and you just start laughing when you stand at some case and they want three Euro for a small bottle of water.
Well....it's come to pass that the European Commission has observed the same trend, and they want to write European codes to force airport operators to offer a bottle of plain water for one Euro....making it a mandated thing.
The comical side of this is that currently.....there's actual water on sale in most airports....which runs more than a liter of gasoline would cost for your car. I'm not talking about the cheap stuff....from the deep wells of Grunstadt (one of my cheap water producers who simply takes city water and puts it into a cheap plastic container). I'm talking about French glacier water, or Icelandic ancient glacier water, or Fiji pure water (it demands the question of what unpure tastes like). I'm talking about just plain regular water.
When you travel via a German airport, you tend to notice absolutely no water coolers along the concourse like you'd see in Nashville, Atlanta or Orlando.
At some stand beyond the airport security point in Frankfurt this year.....I observed a bottle of Fiji water for roughly five Euro. I stood there shaking my head. They had basically the expensive Fiji water, some high-label end water for around three Euro fifty (3.5) and then there was the 2.75 regional water. You'd naturally go for the cheaper stuff but you were probably paying three times what the water would cost at the local grocery store.
Ever since the stringent security rules went into effect....the possibility of you buying your own water cheaply at some gas station while on the way to the airport has gone out the window.
This act by the EU? Once in a while....the EU picks up one single sour topic with the public and actually tries to fix it with a common sense approach. The trouble is that they end up writing a four-page piece of a directive, which has various sub-paragraphs and ends up requiring a lawyer to define what they mean or require. What you might see is a water offered beyond the secure line.....from Turkey or Greece (having been trucked half-way across Europe) as offered as the cheapo one Euro option water.....which most Germans would look at and question if it was 'clean' or 'without a funny taste', then opt to buy the three or four Euro water despite the good intentions of the EU.
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