Yeah. Looks about the same.
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That old photo of RDU is what it looked like when my family moved to Raleigh in January of 1974. The main hall was literally one room next to a small ticketing counter area. There was a bar and a gift store off of the main hall, and I think that there was a mosaic of Wright Brothers in the floor, but that may be my memory playing tricks on me. There wasn’t even an indoor baggage claim. You had to claim your bags outside on that driveway from the back of the trucks that delivered them. Where that prop plane is sitting is where you enplaned and deplaned down a portable staircase that was rolled up to the plane.
Now THAT RDU was definitely giving off bus station vibes!
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Point taken. I guess it is the closed stores/restaurants and darkness that such closure gave out to the ensuring hallways that made me feel like - I hate to use the word - “greyhoundy”. I must confess I was more than a little grumpy when I was unable to get any decent food to eat as the La Farm place had a line a mile long and everything else was boxed food from a vending machine that cost $50 for a salad and chips.
Upon further reflection. I did really love the new system in the parking garage that lets you know where the vacant spaces are located. I also like all the lighting and moving walkways heading into the terminal. Very cool. Thanks @BoyHowdy for the photos to jog my memory. I am getting old after all.
I plan to be fly out of RDU with some regularity in the coming months. I will take it upon myself to look for one positive thing every time I go and report back to this forum as a way of looking on the sunny side of RDU going forward. I obviously have not been paying as much attention to all that it has to offer and only looking at the negative which should be fixed at some point in the future (we hope).
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I’m definitely in the group where I spend as little time as possible in the airport terminal. I usually don’t buy anything in the terminal when I fly. However, during a layover all bets are off and I probably spend too much.
I agree with others that a well-stocked terminal makes a good impression regardless how much you spend.
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Agreed that the light system in the parking garage is great. I have appreciated that the last few times I have flown from RDU.
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I like most of the upgrades to modern airports, but I kind of miss the old portable staircase and walking on the tarmac. I always thought it felt so cool to walk on the tarmac, a real sense of adventure. 
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That old photo of RDU is effectively what our airport looks like right now. They are building a new terminal that is looking very nice, but not the character we’ve all come to expect from flying into Key West. At least you won’t get wet and have to slide down metal stairs anymore.
New facility rendering
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The shops are all opening soon and for the most part, most of them HAVE been open for a long time. And it’s not like RDU is lacking in destinations either. RDU is expected to serve 70 destinations by next year. You can’t expect the airport to serve 170 destinations like Orlando. Especially for a city of our size, we’re actually kinda punching above our weight in destinations. We’re the smallest city by far in the US to have 2 European destinations let alone the 4 we have.
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Well I beg to differ in Terminal 2. We must have had two different universe experiences with respect to things be open versus things being closed. I will just leave it at that. I am going to Boston again mid September so I will re-evaluate the situation at that time with a fresh perspective.
As with destinations served. We were doing better post-covid with non-stops and international flights. We are slowly getting back up to speed. I think we may one day be more of a flight powerhouse. Never O’Hare or JFK. But we can certainly push forward to compete with some of the other mid-sized airports in the US.
A bit of trivia for you that I was unaware of myself - Raleigh-Durham international Airport was the fastest growing airport in the country in 2023, according to US Department of Transportation data. This is out of the top 50 biggest airports in the US.
So who knows we may actually grow up one day to rival some of the bigger boys out there.
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If only we had therapy llamas like Portland’s airport…
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Awww I actually love this idea. It could calm people like me down who are on edge when traveling. Gosh. The great things going on out there.
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With Charlotte so close I am not convinced that we’ll ever be a “bigger boy”. But that is OK as I am not sure we need to be a “bigger boy”.
Here are the numbers: For 2023 CLT had 53,446,295 passengers. RDU had 14,523,996 passengers.
Charlotte is so bad I’m sorry. Yes it’s big and has flights to anywhere, I acknowledge that. But there are signs with 18 minute walk times, absolutely absurd. If it’s an 18 minute walk, they should have a tram like other big airports. Charlotte is a really bad experience all around, every time, even though they have more restaurants and connections.
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Well…we can dream. Personally we are way better than Charlotte in so many other ways. But I guess that’s for another thread. Guess we do have some catching up to do on passengers flying out of RDU. Getting our airport all spiffed up is going to help with that. See previous posts above lol. And llamas. Add the llamas. Those will help too with the unique factor.
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smallest city in the US with a hub…the only reasons they have ‘so many passengers’…is because you are forced through that airport if you are on AA which controls 90+ % of the traffic.
The minute that number drops to 75%…the hub leaves. The city is not much bigger than Raleigh but the corporate support has been historically stronger than Raleigh…they had the much smaller US Airlines hub which was bought by AA. The corporate support (Bank of America) basically guaranteed AA they would ONLY use their airline.
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I actually enjoy RDU much better than CLT. RDU is a very nice airport and serves us quite well. Definitely nothing to hang our heads about!
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Only flown in/out of CLT and RDU a few times, but prefer RDU by a considerable margin. I do think CLT will be at least somewhat more tolerable once the current round of construction is completed, but last time I flew out of there was pretty ridiculous…was dropped off at Zone A or B (can’t remember), had to walk to basically the far end of the terminal to get through security near the Pandora (because the new security gate right inside Zone A wasn’t completed/wasn’t open), then had to walk at least a mile all the way back past Zone A and around to where the Smashburger is. Some of the moving sidewalks worked but some didn’t. I’m in pretty decent shape and can walk forever, but holy crap it was ridiculous looking back at it on a map.
I think RDU’s setup, with multiple terminals, is much easier and more efficient to navigate unless for some reason you have to go from one terminal to the other.
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Agreed! The CLT experience will be much better once the project is complete. And it is a massive project, to the tune of more than $600 million.
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if you get nervous or stressed flying, you might enjoy what Denver airport and other airports are doing:
they have roaming dogs in the airport on leashes who’ve been through a program to encourage people to pet them and chill out. I’ve gotten to meet quite a few of them since I love dogs and I’m often in Denver. They even have trading cards you can collect for each dog 
Would love RDU to add the program here too.
https://www.flydenver.com/about-den/volunteer/canine-airport-therapy-squad-cats/meet-the-cats/
Thank god it’s not cats! hate them!
So here’s something cool for data geeks:
source:https://www.stlannex.com/blogs_2020/blog_airport_connections
The lower down the chart vertical axis the airport is, the bigger actual destination airport it is. The bigger the circle, the more the passenger numbers. The farther out to the right, the more of the passengers are just connecting.
From discussion re: CLT and size relative to RDU: I found a report comparing the passenger numbers of airports vs how many of those are simply making connections at the airports. Unfortunately can’t find a more recent chart, but it reveals as of 2018, more than 70% of CLT passengers were simply connecting there, they weren’t starting or stopping in CLT. (In fact it was the highest % of connections of any airport in the US for the data shown.)
(That 70% number of connecting passengers and total passengers at CLT has only grown since COVID, and total passengers from then grew to about 53 million passengers–including connections–at CLT in 2023.)
The 25-30% of 2023 CLT passengers who actually start or end their trip in CLT is about the same number of passengers who start or end their trip at RDU during 2023. The airport is just bigger there because it has to push more people through it, but in my opinion RDU is a much nicer, classier and upscale airport. There’s just as much traffic of people coming and going to RDU as a destination equal to those coming or going to CLT. We just have way fewer connections. Like 25,000 or less annually, as of 2023.
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Before I moved to Raleigh, I connected at RDU exactly once (and I travel a lot), on a rebooked Thanksgiving week NYC - Tampa itinerary. I do remember thinking it was a really pretty airport.
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