The Hall, Mapped To The Foot
West Linn Airport Meet & Greet Name The Spot. End The Text Thread.
Every botched airport meeting produces the same artifact: a text thread of increasingly desperate geography, by the thing, which thing, the OTHER escalator. This guide retires the genre with a map. PDX's arrivals level is full of named, findable landmarks, a Welcome Booth, twin information booths, a Travel Oregon center guarded by a Sasquatch statue, carousels whose numbering currently skips two, and, new this spring, official meet-and-greet areas with the beloved carpet underfoot, and the airport's own map data quietly indexes several spots with the literal tag 'meeting spot.' Here is the whole inventory, and how to choose from it like a professional.
ByIlyas KhairiFounder, Marquee ChauffeurLicensed and permitted since 2018
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By Ilyas Khairi, Founder of Marquee Chauffeur · Licensed and permitted since 2018 · Updated July 19, 2026
TL;DR
The hall runs north to south: international arrivals exit opposite carousel 9 at the north end (customs 20 to 90 minutes), the south wing holds carousels 2 through 6, the Welcome Booth, and the MAX station, and mid-construction the numbering currently skips 7 and 8. Best fixed points: the traveler's carousel, the Welcome Booth or the Sasquatch statue for the south, the international exit for customs arrivals, and the new carpet-floored meet-and-greet areas by the concourse exits. Say the landmark, stand still, done.
The full gate-to-curb walkthrough lives on the arrival walkthrough, the stay-put mathematics on the greet failures guide, and the greeter's working day on the greeter's day guide.
01The Inventory
One Hall, North To South,
With A Gap In The Numbering.
Start with what the airport's own live map names on the baggage-claim level. The spine runs north to south: at the far north, international passengers arrive opposite carousel 9 after a customs process the airport itself brackets at 20 to 90 minutes; carousel 10 anchors that end, the south wing runs carousels 6 down through 2, and the MAX station closes the far south. Between them sit the named furniture: the Welcome Booth on the south side, two volunteer-staffed information booths working 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., the Travel Oregon center, airline baggage-service offices, and currency exchange. The charming asterisk of the moment: the live map shows no carousels 7 or 8, two sections labeled Coming Soon mid-renovation, while the printable map still draws the old set, so the hall's numbering currently jumps 6 to 9, a detail worth knowing before you text meet me at 7.
North means international
The single most consequential fact on the map: customs arrivals exit at the north end, opposite 9, nearly five hundred computed feet from the south-wing landmarks. A greeter posted at the Welcome Booth for an Amsterdam arrival is standing in the wrong neighborhood, patiently, for up to ninety minutes.
The volunteer booths, always on
The information booths are staffed daily by the blue-vested corps our greeter's-day guide salutes, and the north booth's own map entry carries tags for paging and meet-and-assist. Lost parties have a staffed human fallback at both ends of the hall, which is more than most airports can say.
The construction caveat, standing
Baggage-claim areas remain under phased renovation, the site's own banner says so, and the interactive map outranks the printable PDF while they disagree. Any meeting instruction older than a season deserves a fresh glance at the live map, this guide's own included.
The airport indexed your intent
Deep in the map's search data, several points carry hidden synonym tags like meeting spot and even the full question of where to meet international arrivals. The institution has quietly optimized itself for exactly the problem this guide solves, which we take as encouragement.
02The Landmarks
The Welcome Booth, And
A Statue Named Bigfoot.
The south wing's meeting cluster is tight enough to walk in under a minute. By coordinates computed from the airport's own map data, the Welcome Booth stands about 42 feet from the south information booth, roughly 68 from carousel 4, and a coffee's length from Peet's, with the Travel Oregon welcome center a hundred feet on, guarded by the hall's best landmark: a carved Sasquatch statue, an official art installation whose entry in the airport's map system carries the url key bigfoot, and which Travel Oregon's own directions embrace without shame, across from carousel 5, next to Sasquatch, yes, really. A landmark works because a tired stranger can find it without interpretation, and a nine-foot wooden cryptid clears that bar like nothing else in the building. Meet me at the Sasquatch is, quite seriously, the best six-word meeting instruction the south hall offers.
What makes a landmark work
The test is findability by someone who has never been here: unique, visible, nameable in one breath. The Sasquatch passes; by the escalators fails, there are several; carousel numbers pass when the screens confirm them. Choose landmarks a stranger's eye can verify, not ones a local's memory supplies.
The paging phones, mapped
The hall's analog fallback sits in plain sight: white paging telephones, press zero, connected to the paging desk whose 24-hour searchable log our failures guide celebrates. The complete lost-party protocol is landmark first, phones second, and the booths' blue vests at any point in between.
The carousel as default
For checked-bag arrivals the traveler's own carousel remains the professional default, they must go there anyway, and the screens name it. The refinement is standing at its inflow end where deplaning traffic arrives, the positioning craft our anatomy guide details, board raised before the first bags drop.
South booth, wrong for customs
The map's one trap repeats for emphasis: the Welcome Booth is a south-wing landmark, nearly five hundred feet from the international exit. International greets stage north, opposite carousel 9, full stop, and our confirmations name the right end of the building because the map told us to.
03The New Official Spots
PDX Joins The World's
Named Meeting Points, Carpet First.
The world's great arrival halls formalize this craft: Heathrow publishes an official meeting point per terminal, opposite this exit, beside that shop, and Changi names an Arrival Meeting Hall in each of its terminals. This spring PDX joined the tradition in the most Portland way possible: official meeter-and-greeter areas by the concourse exits, designed as easy meeting spots with the retro PDX carpet underfoot, the 1988 runway-pattern icon whose 2015 removal spawned socks, sneakers, and a civic mourning period, deliberately re-laid where people stop and wait while the walking corridors got hard floors for wheels. The airport's map even scatters additional named Carpet patches upstairs, several tagged, in its own hidden search data, as meeting spots. A city that turns its airport carpet into a rendezvous institution deserves greeters who use it properly.
Ours do, by name, in every confirmation: (503) 706-8662.
Which exit, which area
The new areas pair with the terminal's two sides, one by the B and C exit, one by D and E, so the meeting instruction inherits the flight's concourse: an Alaska arrival funnels to one, the legacy carriers' to the other. The gate number in the tracking app quietly chooses your carpet.
Carpet upstairs, carousels down
Precision the map insists on: the named Carpet patches live at the exit level and mezzanine, not beside the belts, so carpet meetings suit the no-checked-bags arrival while carousel meetings suit everyone else. Two floors, two defaults, one escalator between them, choose before anyone lands.
How belts get chosen anyway
The flight-to-carousel assignment is live operations research, airport systems allocating belts by aircraft size and timing, published to the hall's screens the moment it settles. It is also why the carousel in the airline's app occasionally updates mid-taxi: the machine reassigned, and the screens know first.
The global habit, imported
Travelers trained at Heathrow and Changi already speak meeting-point: they expect a named spot in the confirmation and simply walk to it. PDX's new areas let Portland greets run on the same grammar, which is exactly how our booking confirmations now phrase them.
04The Chooser
Matching The Spot
To The Arrival.
The whole map compresses to a chooser a family can memorize. Checked bags, domestic: meet at the traveler's carousel, confirmed on the screens at wheels-down. No bags, south-side flight: the Welcome Booth or the Sasquatch, whichever phrase makes them smile. International, always: the north exit opposite carousel 9, with customs patience budgeted. Reunion with an audience: the new carpet meet-and-greet area on the flight's concourse side, room to hold the sign high. And in every case the discipline our failures guide proved with mathematics: the instruction names one spot, the greeter anchors at it immovably, and the traveler does all the walking. Our confirmations encode the chooser automatically, spot selected from the booking's facts, named in writing, held without wandering, which is why West Linn families who book the greet have never once sent the which-escalator text. The map is free; the standing-still is the service.
The family cheat sheet
Screenshot the chooser above and pin it to the family chat: four arrival types, four spots, one rule about standing still. It upgrades every DIY greet the household ever runs, which is a strange thing for a car service to give away and exactly the kind of guide this program exists to write.
The professional overlay
The hired greet adds what the map cannot: the tracking watch that times the stand, the board with the right name, the bags, and the staged car at the end, the machinery our anatomy guide documents. Map plus machinery is the whole product; this guide simply publishes the half that costs nothing.
When the map changes
Carousels 7 and 8 will return, the Coming Soon sections will earn names, and this guide re-audits when they do, the standing promise of every map in this program. Until then the live airport map outranks memory, print, and confident relatives, in that order.
The standing meeting-point file
West Linn households keep their preferred spots on file through West Linn town car service: grandma's bench near the south booth, the college kid's carpet side, the standing international instruction. The map runs once per family; the confirmations inherit it forever.
Frequently Asked
Questions, Answered.
How do I figure out which baggage claim to go to?
The flight-to-carousel mapping is published everywhere once you know to look: the baggage screens in the arrivals hall, the airport's flight-status pages, and increasingly your airline's own app push it before you deplane. Behind the screens, an operational database assigns belts in real time, which is why the answer can change on a delayed night. For greeters the rule is simply to check at wheels-down, not at booking, and anchor at the carousel the screens name.
Where in the airport do I meet arriving passengers?
The wisdom the forums keep re-deriving: pick one fixed, findable location in the baggage-claim area, even if your traveler has no checked bags, because everyone exits through that level anyway. At PDX the menu of fixed points is unusually good, the named Welcome Booth, the information booths, the Travel Oregon center beside its Sasquatch statue, the traveler's own carousel, and, new this year, official meet-and-greet areas with the famous carpet underfoot by the concourse exits.
How do you meet someone at the gate at the airport?
At PDX, only through airline instruments, escort passes issued at the ticket counter at the airline's discretion for minors and travelers needing assistance, since no general visitor pass exists here. The practical consolation is geometric: the finished terminal's exit paths run gate to public side in minutes, so a greeter at the right downstream landmark delivers a gate-greeting's warmth with none of its paperwork, which is why this map exists.
Can non-passengers go inside the airport?
Everywhere the public side reaches, yes: ticketing halls, the arrivals level, baggage claim, the shops and coffee before security, and the new meet-and-greet areas were built precisely for waiting families. The checkpoint is the boundary. A greeter can therefore cover every location in this guide without a ticket, and the only decision that matters is which of the hall's named landmarks to claim as yours.
How to identify luggage on a carousel?
Distinctiveness beats memory: a strap, a ribbon, a luggage tag with large print, photographed at check-in so the description is exact. Half of carousel confusion is identical black suitcases; the other half is watching the wrong carousel, which the screens solve. For met arrivals the greeter adds a second pair of eyes, and for relocation-scale loads the count-against-the-tags discipline our relocation guide describes turns a luggage pile into a checklist.
About the Author
Ilyas Khairi runs Marquee Chauffeur under Portland Bureau of Transportation certification held since 2018, with $1 million in commercial liability and W-2 chauffeurs on payroll. He can name every fixed point in the arrivals hall from memory, considers meet me at the Sasquatch the finest sentence in Pacific Northwest logistics, and re-walks the hall after every renovation phase so the confirmations never lie.
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Book the greet with the spot already named: (503) 706-8662, available 24/7. West Linn meet-and-greets at about $220 in the Volvo S90, $270 in the Escalade ESV, $330 in the Sprinter, flat-quoted with the meeting point selected from the booking's facts, written into the confirmation, and held without wandering, under Portland private-for-hire permitting since 2018 with $1 million in commercial liability.