Do airports suck the life out of your phone?

So we are sitting at the airport a couple of hours when I see my phone is nearly dead and a short time later my wife says hers is gettin' low, and when we land, the guy picking us up says his was getting low for the couple hours he was waiting for us, and he tells his family and his daughter says hers too, when she was at the airport. So 4 different phones at three different airports going dead like twice as fast as normal. And we were all sitting above ground and they have big windows so we had good signal.