Heathrow campaigners engage freetext in their fight

Heathrow isn’t a joyous airport to use at the best of times. Massively overcrowded, far too much focus on flogging-you-stuff rather than making it easy to get on the plane. Constantly harassed staff. No, it’s not fun at all.

However, the possibility of a third runway for the airport might help make the travel experience better. Alas, a third runway heavily, heavily impacts the surrounding areas.

Noise. Pollution. Congrestion. Climage change. Those are the four main objections by the local councils from around the Heathrow Airport area (although everyone and their dog is using the climate change/co2 argument nowadays).

Whatever your perspective on the debate, the councils have launched a freetext service to help enlist support (from readers of the London Evening Standard in the example picture above). Freetext has been bandied about for quite some time — indeed I remember chatting to Nick Ris at MX Telecom about the possibility of launching freetext services for one of our clients years ago.

The service is now available from your friendly local mobile aggregator in the UK and has been for some time. I haven’t seen many examples of it in practice yet — so it was excellent to see this one.

If you’re against the third runway at Heathrow Airport, all you need do to show support is text NO followed by your email address to shortcode 80800. The text won’t cost you any money at all — not even, i gather, the standard network rate.

(You could try texting YES but you might get a negative response)

More info here.