Los Angeles and Boston Are Among World’s Worst Airports

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 11:51AM EST · Published Mar 17, 7:19AM EDT

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Los Angeles and Boston Are Among World’s Worst Airports — © Thinkstock

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.
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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.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

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.