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So I will preface this article by saying that I tried several times to figure out a good headline that wasn’t clickbait-y. I understand the tension between a headline that will catch a (potential) reader’s eye and something that people will consider “clickbait”. I wanted to write a post talking about my home airport showing up #1, and if you’ve got a title you’d prefer, I’d love to hear it in the comments 🙂
Anyways – with that… on to the show
Skytrax World Airport Rankings 2017
The 2017 Skytrax World Airport rankings came out recently and I thought a few things on there were interesting. Generally I am a bit skeptical about rankings like these as pretty much anybody can make a ranking for whatever they want based on whatever made-up criteria they want. Like say… The 28 worst tourist traps out there, or the top 50 landmarks in the USA. But according to Skytrax, their methodology is as follows (emphasis mine)
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 2017 World Airport Awards are based on 13.82 million survey questionnaires completed by 105 different nationalities of airline customers during the survey period which operated from July 2016 to February 2017. The survey covered 555 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.
The top 10 overall ranked airports were
- Singapore Changi
- Tokyo Intl Haneda
- Incheon Intl Airport
- Munich Airport
- Hong Kong Intl Airport
- Hamad Intl Airport
- Centrair Nagoya
- Zurich Airport
- Heathrow Airport
- Frankfurt Airport
Not many (any) US airports in the top 10. In fact, the highest ranked airport was… Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG)?!? (#26). I was pretty stoked to see my home airport ranked #1. I mean it’s nice and all but….
According to the press release, CVG was also ranked the World’s Best Airport Serving 5 – 10 Million Passengers and the Best Regional Airport in North America
The other US airports in the World Top 100 were
- #28 Denver
- #39 San Francisco
- #41 Atlanta
- #46 Dallas Fort Worth
- #54 Houston
- #58 Seattle
- #63 New York JFK
- #72 Minneapolis / St. Paul
- #86 LAX
- #88 Phoenix
- #89 Boston
- #94 Detroit
What do you think about the 2017 World Airport rankings?
Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I was in CVG in June of last year. I must say it’s pretty easy to move around and overall experience was great with check in, security etc.
Yeah – one nice thing about it is that it’s small enough that you can still get around without things being too crowded.
Even when it had full Delta hub status, CVG was easy to get in/out of and around. It is just designed well. So I am not surprised. It seems quite dead at times now. I think that is just because some of us are used to the old times.
i’m surprised tucson is not on the list … what a beautiful airport. lovely landscaping with all the cacti, car rental in the terminal building, painless security, no problem getting a seat with a view of the runway, taxis readily available, speedy baggage claim, plenty of plug points for charging phone/computer, etc.
It is evident that that authors of the survey never visited LAX. YUCK!!!
I thought about that too but wondered how many different airports are out there. It’s probably closer to the bottom than the top! 🙂
Wait a minute … I thought you lived in Northern California . Is that another writer ?
Yes – there are a few writers here at PWaC. I (Dan) am the founder of Points With a Crew and live in Cincinnati. Two of the other writers (Ian and Sharon) live in northern California (Depending on how you define northern California!)