Travel Q&A: The Atlanta airport is busy, but also well thought out.(South Florida Sun-Sentinel)

Byline: Jean Allen

Q. I plan to fly north to visit relatives for Christmas. I seldom fly anywhere, but I will this time, and I am ticketed to change planes in Atlanta. Friends tell me that the airport there is confusing and crowded, so I am leery. I would appreciate your advice on whether to try to change my route to avoid Atlanta. _ A.F., Delray Beach, Fla.

A. When Atlanta's huge Hartsfield International Airport expansion first opened, frequent fliers, including me, were intimidated by the size of the place, and knew that it was hard to avoid, since a high percentage of flights in the South go through this major hub. To quote one cynic, "To get to heaven, you have to go through Atlanta."

I got over that on a trip when I was stuck at Hartsfield for several hours, waiting for my homebound jet. I went exploring, and after I visited every one of the six concourses in one easy swoop, I concluded that Hartsfield is as well-organized and passenger-friendly as any airport I've ever used. Good thing, since it is also the world's busiest airport, handling nearly 25 million passengers a year.

I visited all six concourses, long rectangles lined up in a row, facing each other, linked by lower-level train and walkway. I could have ridden the people mover trains that operate on a 3.5-mile loop and stop at every concourse. But I was exploring, so I walked, about eight minutes from one concourse to the next. I'd ride an escalator down to ground level, walk along a corridor, then back up another escalator, arriving at the center point of the next concourse, gates stretching out to the left and right, shops and restaurants clustered near the center. And so it went, an up-and-down walk from one end of the airport to the other.

If the InMotion Pictures booth had been available then, I might have skipped my exploring and settled down to watch a movie on a rented portable DVD player, a small handheld device. On a recent trip, I found InMotion booths on Concourses A and B. If you want to take the player and movie along on a flight, the service includes packaging and shipping labels to send them back.

I passed 75 food and beverage places, most of them organized into food courts, plus 82 retail stores and 21 service sites. I learned that Hartsfield, now called Hartsfield-Jackson, serves 24 passenger airlines and 20 cargo lines that take off and land at four parallel runways. There are 146 domestic and 28 international gates.