The general chaos of lost bags, cancelled flights and the rest caused by the botched opening of Heathrow's Terminal 5 was painful for everybody involved, but for airport executives in Dubai it was also timely. Paul Griffiths, the former head of Gatwick who is now chief executive of Dubai Airports, watched the horrors at T5 unfold and insisted that his own new terminal should not be publicly shamed in the same way.

Moreover, the lessons of Heathrow were learnt in the Gulf. After months of analysing the mistakes of T5, Dubai's Terminal 3 opened last month with little fanfare and fewer problems.

The two new terminals in London and Dubai are similar in several ways: They will both handle about 30million passengers a year; they were built around constraints imposed by the existing facilities; and they are both home to their respective flag carriers, British Airways and Emirates.

Yet the differences are also dramatic. T5 is the largest free-standing structure in the UK, with a roof the size of five football pitches, but it is still only one third of the size of Dubai's T3 (“T5 is far too small for what BA will need in the future,” Tim Clark, president of Emirates Airline, said). The Dubai facility cost $4.5billion (£2.9billion) and took just over eight years to complete. T5 cost £4.3billion and has been in development for 19 years.

And their launches could not have contrasted more. T5 was opened by the Queen in a televised ceremony and BA spent millions of pounds on advertising and marketing, ensuring that everybody was aware that the airline was moving to a new home. T3 opened so quietly that passengers would have known that the terminal was new only if they had touched the still-drying paint.

“There was a lot of arrogance and hubris around the opening of T5, with all the ads and publicity that BA generated,” Mr Griffiths said. “The first rule of customer service is under-promise and over-deliver because that way you get their loyalty. BA was telling people that they were getting a glimpse of the future with T5, which created expectation and increased the chances of disappointment.”

Dubai T3's opening did not go perfectly and there were computer glitches, some of the retailers were not ready and a fountain sprang a leak, but because Emirates was moving into the terminal with only a few flights at a time Mr Griffiths said that the problems were dealt with easily. BA had hundreds of flights operating from T5 from day one, so even small problems became disasters.

BA and BAA, which owns Heathrow, also struggled because their staff were not sufficiently familiar with how the new terminal operated, which led to employees turning up late on the first day and getting lost.

Mr Griffiths said: “Having watched the development of T5, it was clear that we had to make sure that everyone was on-message. We just had to bang heads together so that people realised what was at stake. We knew the world would be watching and waiting after T5 to see whether T3 was the next big terminal fiasco. We worked very hard to make sure that didn't happen.”

However, perhaps the single biggest difference between T5 and T3 is in the scale of their ambition. T5 will give Heathrow a capacity of 75million passengers a year, but the airport is already handling 68million people a year so there is almost no room for (comfortable) growth.

T3 will take Dubai's capacity to 60million passengers, with only 40million expected to use the airport this year. In addition, Dubai is building a five-runway mega-airport in the desert, which will enable the city to handle a further 160million passengers a year.

“In the UK, the mindset is incremental,” said Mr Griffiths. “In Dubai they don't think in increments, they think in giant leaps. There is a recognition here that air travel and economic growth are integrally linked, so they want to build the capacity now so it is available when needed rather than ten years too late.”

----

BA's new home may seem vast, but you ain't seen nothing yet

David Robertson

Heathrow's Terminal 5 may have become synonymous with its disastrous opening, but the facility is working well and has dramatically improved the world's busiest international airport.

Because of space constraints, T5 was built upwards to create a multi-storey system, where passengers check-in at the top and pick up their bags and leave at the bottom.

This means that travellers depart from a magnificent space beneath the undulating roof. It is bright, open and spacious, which is not something that can be said about any other space at crowded Heathrow.

Passengers can get their boarding cards from 96 self-service kiosks and then move on about ten metres to the bag drop, before walking on a further ten metres to enter security. The idea is to keep people moving forward and to eliminate queues.

BA may still be fighting its baggage system, but anecdotal reports from passengers using T5 have been positive.

Dubai's Terminal 3 has also been designed around space constraints. The check-in and baggage reclaim areas are underneath the runway apron and hundreds of marble pillars support the roof. In baggage reclaim the ceiling is high and the rows of columns give the huge room the feeling of a cathedral. In departures, the roof is lower and, as a result, makes less of an impression than T5.

After checking in at one of 120 kiosks, passengers leave the underground cavern and enter a long, thin space through which they move on the way to their aircraft.

The vast scale of T3 can be intimidating - it is 1.2km long (almost three quarters of a mile) and passengers have to walk nearly half a kilometre merely to get through check-in - but this massive space does give Emirates, the only airline operating from T3, the opportunity to provide many more facilities than British Airways' home at T5. There is a 199-room hotel within the terminal for transferring passengers, while the business-class lounge seats 1,400 people. The first-class lounge seats another 900.

Incredibly, T3 is set to get even bigger. By 2011, Emirates will have added another concourse for its double-decker A380 jets and the early designs for this building include a business-class lounge that will seat 3,000.

Terminal 5, the UK's largest building, will begin to feel intimate by comparison.

Times Recommends

• Minister in talks with Saudis to protect creditors
• Premier Inn hits back in £29-a-room row
• Bankers hit back at 'populist' bonus supertax