America’s Worst Airport

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Aug 14, 9:14AM EDT · Published Aug 11, 9:30AM EDT

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America’s Worst Airport — © Roman Tiraspolsky / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Customers hate to wait in line anywhere. Airports can be among the most difficult of those places. People are loaded down with luggage. They have to take off their shoes and coats. X-rayed bags sometimes cause officials to rifle through people’s personal property. All these waiting times added together are called “queuing.” This includes checking in, dropping off bags, gate delays and passport control on international flights. Based on these measures, the worst airport in the United States is Newark International Airport, one of three that serves the New York metro area. The other two are LaGuardia and Kennedy. (These are America’s 26 worst airports.)
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Vacation rental firm Casago ranked airports on queuing duration based on Skytrax ratings. Airports were given grades 1 to 5, with 5 as the best. From that, the survey picked the percentage of 4 or 5 ranked airports to create rankings. Newark’s percentage of these high grades was only 9.09%. At the far end of the spectrum was Portland at 61.29%.
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The queuing duration problem will not get better and could get worse. Carriers have been overwhelmed. After cutting pilots and flight crews and parking aircraft for months due to travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, they saw travelers come streaming back, eventually in record numbers. Carriers were not prepared for such a rapid rebound.
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And this surge, made worse by unusual amounts of bad weather across much of the country, has made wait times nearly intolerable. A spike in summer storms means this problem will last beyond Labor Day, usually considered the end of summer.
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These are America’s worst airports:

Newark International (9.09%)
Daniel K. Inouye International (9.72%)
Seattle-Tacoma International (12.38%)
Salt Lake City International (13.33%)
Miami International (14.12%)

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.