Although it may not seem like it, airports are more than just a place to board your flights. airports are places that can make or break the trip, and in some cases, they can even help with the arrival of tourists, something that is important in countries like Peru.
Airports around the world have been working hard to improve their facilities and services, regardless of their size or location. For this reason, this year’s results on the best airports in the world have changed a lot compared to last year.
The Skytrax World Airport Awards are now in its 20th edition, so the results have a good balance of what travelers think about airports around the world. This year there were 13 new entries in the top 100 airports.
The awards are based on surveys completed by more than 13 million travelers from over 100 different countries. The survey was conducted between August 2017 and February 2018 at 550 airports around the globe.
No one likes airports. They’re big and noisy, full of people and luggage and queues. Planes are delayed or cancelled, luggage goes missing, security is overbearing.
But some airports are worse than others. Here’s a list of the best and worst in the world, with data taken from an annual survey produced by Skytrax. The survey is based on the views of 13 million passengers worldwide, and takes into account 39 factors relating to comfort, cleanliness, shopping facilities, staff service and more.
In this page, I have listed the best airports in the world. This is a subjective rating, based on my own experiences in the past years. It’s a bit skewed towards European airports, due to my not having travelled all that much outside Europe (yet).
I generally do not rate any airport with less than ten flights to and from it, since that usually means that I have only been there once. However, some airports manage to make such an impression on me after one or two visits that they appear in this list anyway.
Furthermore, I have not included major international hubs like Heathrow or Frankfurt, simply because I find it impossible to compare those airports with smaller ones. One can only find out how good a small airport is by actually using it. On the other hand, you can get an idea of how bad a big airport is just by looking at its statistics (delays and cancellations).
Like most travellers, I am a serial airport hater. I am constantly irritated by the queues, the queues, the queues and then (when I finally get to my gate) the queues.
So it is a surprise to find that I have just spent an hour or so reading the latest survey of airport quality published by Skytrax, whose home page proclaims that it is “the world’s leading airline and airport review and ranking site.”
I found this survery through this article on CNNGo. The strong point of the survey is that it has surveyed 12 million people for their views on every aspect of airports.
The top-rated airport in the world was Singapore Changi. The best in North America was Vancouver International Airport. In Europe it was Munich, with Amsterdam Schiphol second. First place in Asia went to Incheon near Seoul; Tokyo Haneda came second. Overall, eleven out of 15 Asian airports scored higher than any North American one (which are all clustered near the bottom).
The worst region for airports was Africa; only one made it into the top 50.
It would be interesting to see how these ratings correlate with other measures of economic performance and development: GDP per capita, HDI, Freedom Index etc.)
It’s been a while since I last updated the World Airport Rankings. There have been some new surveys and passenger polls conducted that allow us to update the results a bit. The good news is that there are more airports in the top 10 now than before, the bad news is that the 3rd place is still unchanged…
Note that this ranking combines service quality and quantity parameters. The service quality is given by two sources: Skytrax (which accounts for 50% of the final service score) and ACI (which accounts for 25%). The quantity is given by OAG (which accounts for 25% of the final score).
In this post I publish just a short summary of the top 10 airports in terms of overall airport service quality. For more details, rankings and historical data go to this page on my site.
The following is an attempt to rank some of the better airports around the world. In doing so we will concentrate on the passenger experience and not just the facilities available at these airports.
Our criteria for inclusion are:
1. The airport must have handled over 10 million passengers in 2006.
2. The airport must be a commercial airport with scheduled services.
3. The airport must be open for business for 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and 365 days per year. Private or military airports are excluded.
4. The airport must be located in a country where English is an official language or where English is widely spoken and understood by the majority of the population. This is important as most of our readers are English speaking and do not speak other languages (we do however have readers from all over the world).
5. We have visited the airport personally in order to evaluate it and take photographs of it (though we may also add new airports in future without having physically visited them).
This list is based on our own personal experiences and opinions and you should take this into account when reading through it. We realise that some readers may not agree with this list, but then again, that’s what makes life interesting!
In the past decade, world airlines have improved their quality of service to a degree that is remarkable. And yet few passengers seem to appreciate it. The mean annual score on our global Airline Quality Rating (AQR) has risen from 3.24 in 2000 to 3.52 in 2009, where 5 is the best AQR score possible.
This improvement was achieved while U.S. airlines improved their AQR scores by an average of 0.27 points per year and during a period that included the events of September 11th, an SARS epidemic, avian flu scares, and numerous other problems including major bankruptcies and mergers.
The airline industry has become more competitive but not necessarily more profitable for all players. As a result, there is much concentration among the airline industry’s leaders. In 2005 alone there were seven major airline mergers or agreements to merge and by 2006 four mega-carriers controlled almost 80% of the domestic market with at least one super-carrier controlling over 25% of the market (Delta/Northwest controlled 29%, United/Continental controlled 28%, Southwest controlled 18%, and American Airlines controlled 16% of the domestic travel market).
Airlines are more competitive today than they have been in many years