Transportation

Los Angeles and Boston Are Among World's Worst Airports

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Most of the headlines about the new Skytrax “The World’s Top 100 Airports — 2016” are about the first place award received by Singapore Changi. At the bottom of the list are among the worst “top 100 airports,” including Boston Logan and Los Angeles International. These rank just above the Kazan International Airport located in Tatarstan, Russia.

What does it take to be a “worst” airport on the list? The methodology is a kind of black box, as is the case with many customer satisfaction surveys:

Operating since 1999, the World Airport Survey is held in high esteem for clarity of process and principles of independence. No outside sponsorship, payment or external influence is applied to any part of the Survey, making it a most respected global airport customer study providing the core voting data for the Awards. The 2016 World Airport Awards are based on 13.25 million survey questionnaires completed by 106 different nationalities of airline customers during the survey period which operated from June 2015 to February 2016. The survey covered 550 airports worldwide and evaluates traveller experiences across different airport service and product key performance indicators – from check-in, arrivals, transfers, shopping, security and immigration through to departure at the gate.

In other words, the airports and their staffs cannot vote.

Several large U.S. airports are among the worst of the best group:

89 Detroit Airport
90 Manchester Airport
91 Los Angeles Airport
92 Malta Intl Airport
93 Prague Airport
94 Muscat Intl Airport
95 Stansted Airport
96 Geneva Intl Airport
97 Boston Logan Airport
98 Fukuoka Airport
99 Luxembourg Airport
100 Kazan Intl Airport

No U.S. airport is among the best of the best. The Denver Airport ranks 28th, followed by the Cincinnati/Kentucky Airport.

So, essentially American airports are not well run, but in favor of the U.S. locations, none appear to have direct flights to Kazan International Airport.

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