TRAVEL INSIDER : Efficiency and Indecision in the Air and the Office : Updates: As Denver readies new airport, San Diego waffles. California tourist office slow to respond.

Leave any traveler with too many hours to pass in planes and airports, and complaints will follow. We’ll roll our eyes at lines that crowd poorly designed waiting rooms, glare at ambiguous hallway signs, scoff at wordy safety instructions from flight attendants. In that spirit, this column offers a trio of efficiency updates and warnings.

Two items involve airports often used by Southern California travelers: Denver, where the rush to open a new facility could bring high-stress holidays this winter, and San Diego, where indecision over a new facility has led to an upgrade effort at the city’s much-criticized existing airport.

Meanwhile, a travel newsletter recently tested the responsiveness of state tourism offices. The study found them simultaneously gaining technology and losing speed, with California coming out, well, slow.

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In Denver: Since federal approval in September, 1989, local leaders have been working toward the opening of that city’s new airport, a massive facility expected to cost $2.7 billion and cover about twice as much land as does Manhattan (34,000 acres). The opening date was set for Oct. 31 of this year, when all traffic would be rerouted from existing Stapleton International Airport.

But city officials recently postponed the opening in order to “work out a few of the bugs” in the new facility. Denver city officials now say Stapleton--the sixth-busiest airport in the nation with 31 million passengers last year, and a key hub for United Airlines--will continue to serve as the city’s primary airport until Dec. 18. On Dec. 19, only six days before Christmas, the new Denver International Airport will take over all passenger traffic at the start of the most tumultuous two weeks of the year for U.S. airports.

In a remarkably restrained editorial, the travel trade journal Travel Weekly last month noted that “it might have made sense for the city to wait until after the holiday crush to open this lavish present. But there’s always a good argument to implement a change as soon as possible, even if a transition isn’t as smooth as one would hope.”

Norm Avery, spokesman for the new airport, acknowledged that Dec. 19 is “not a great date” for opening, and that the air carriers and air freight companies are “not thrilled about it.” But, he continued, “We’re going to make it work.” He also noted that workers will spend weeks “shaking down” the new facility.

City officials have a strong motivation for opening the new site in December: Starting Jan. 1, Avery said, a construction debt of $500,000 a day comes due, and is scheduled to be paid by operating revenues from the new site.

Travelers may be excused if they feel squeamish about all this. Can anyone out there imagine a perfectly smooth opening for such an enormous new undertaking? Unless they’re feeling quite lucky, eastbound travelers should consider steering clear of Denver connections in late December.

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In San Diego: Lindbergh Field is not universally loved. The airport, which opened in 1928, is limited on one side by the city’s harbor and on the other by its downtown. It is neighbored by steep hills and handles all its arriving and departing jets on one runway. Seven-hundred feet from that runway, near the approach path, stands a six-story commercial building and parking structure, the Laurel Travel Center. The FAA approved the structure, but it has been decried as “an accident waiting to happen” by the Air Line Pilots Assn.

“Landing at Lindbergh is somewhat like trying to drive your car into the garage at high speed,” wrote United Airlines pilot Hal Sprogis in a letter to The Times five years ago.

When Sprogis drafted that letter, the airport’s airborne traffic was running just beyond its rated capacity of 10 million passengers a year. By last year, the annual traffic had reached 12 million. By 1995, that number is projected to reach 14.7 million.

The place is no picnic on the ground, either. Especially in holiday traffic, the airport layout forces terminal-bound walkers to dodge multiple lanes of ground transportation traffic, and requires departing drivers to make split-second lane-change decisions. For years, there has been wide agreement that Lindbergh Field should be replaced, or at least augmented, by a new, roomier site.

Among the options officials have considered: building a binational facility along San Diego County’s border with Mexico on inland Otay Mesa; building at Camp Pendleton in northern San Diego County; building east of Miramar Naval Air Station; converting the Miramar Naval Air Station, and using a multiple-airport scheme.

With no consensus on hand, the Port of San Diego, which operates the airport, last year started a $90-million airport renovation and expansion project designed to ease current concerns and give local leaders more time to haggle over a new site.

Thanks to that, San Diego-bound travelers can look for the following improvements in the next two years: Restroom upgrades are scheduled for completion in August. The paging system upgrade should be finished by September. Improved parking lot controls should be in place by next February, followed by runway-area upgrades and fuel-storage relocation later in the year. The list also includes added gates and improvements to surrounding roads, with first elements to be completed in 1994.

But the prospects for immediate progress on a new airport remain, in a word, dismal.

The San Diego City Council, which in 1990 expressed a preference for the Otay Mesa site, late this month could lift a building moratorium at Otay Mesa and thus lose its chance to set aside the land for an airport. Garry Bonelli, spokesman for the San Diego Assn. of Governments, said last week that no new prime site has been chosen, and no government agency he knows of is working on that issue.

“Even if there was total consensus in this region, and the money was in our hot little hands,” Bonelli added, “it would be about 10 years before we could get up and going.”

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In the mail: Picture a man at a telephone in Whitefish, Mont., performing a public service.

Beginning early on Jan. 5, 1993, that man--a representative of luxury newsletter Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report--started calling government tourist bureaus in all 50 states, each time requesting a general travel packet.

The newsletter’s spokeswoman reports that it took him about 14 hours, including 10 redials, to get through to Delaware, and eight hours to reach New York. But the mail results are worth noting. Described in the March issue of the newsletter, they suggest that while technology is rising among state tourism offices, efficiency has been falling. California in particular fared poorly.

In a similar survey two years ago, the newsletter found that “one or two” states had strictly computerized answering machines. Thirty-seven states responded within three weeks of the phone calls.

This year, eight states had entirely computerized phone setups. Yet in the same three-week time frame, only 24 sent the requested material to the Montana mailing address. Massachusetts did so in three days. Following shortly thereafter were Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.

During the fourth week came word from Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina and Virginia.

During the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth weeks came Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, New Jersey, Kansas and Tennessee.

After two months, the newsletter still hadn’t heard from Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Rhode Island, Texas . . . and California.

Fred Sater, spokesman for the California Office of Tourism, noted that in December, the agency started using a new contractor to answer mail requests, and that the transition may have slowed paperwork. (The state’s tourist information number: 800-862-2543.) Ordinarily, he said, the state sends out responses via fourth-class mail within four to six weeks.