The air travel business was savaged early during the COVID-19 pandemic. The disease kept flights grounded for months. The federal government had to bail out large carriers. These carriers dismissed tens of thousands of people, including flight crews and pilots. Then, as the world “opened up” as the disease became less dangerous, demand came surging back. Carriers became overwhelmed as they tried to bring back employees and airplanes. Service quality plunged, and delays became a regular part of flying. (These U.S. airports have the worst customer satisfaction.)
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As the industry returned to normal, some airports had long waits for people to get from the curb to their gates. Luggage-storage platform Bounce recently released the results of a study that measured how long those waits were. It used data from Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Customs & Border Protection. The passport control information was collected from April 26, 2022, to April 25, 2023. A combination of the two time periods was used to pick the airports with the most extended wait times.
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Airports in Florida dominated the list of longest wait times, but JFK International Airport, one of three airports in the New York City area, topped the list. It has an average wait time of 48 minutes and 24 seconds. The report’s authors claim this is because of the huge amount of traffic that goes through JFK: “This leads to increased pressure on the airport’s infrastructure and staff, causing longer wait times at passport control and security checkpoints.” JFK is also a hub for a large number of carriers, which adds to the long wait times.
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San Francisco Airport was second on the list, with an average wait time of 47:18. Miami followed this at 45:54, Fort Lauderdale at 42:00 and Orlando at 40:12.
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The airports with the shortest wait time were Baltimore/Washington at 14:48 and San Antonio at 17:42.
This US Airport Has the Longest Wait Time
© YakobchukOlena / iStock via Getty Images
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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