Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/14/fodors-picks-the-worst-airpo.html
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4 Likes
Fodor’s criticisms of LAX are spot on. It can take me 30 minutes to get there and then I sit within sight of it for another 20 minutes before I can actually get in to my terminal.
LAX is doing great work to try to solve the problem with the new people mover and making space for ride shares but it’s all going to take so long. It will never be able to compete with the ease that Burbank provides.
6 Likes
How dare LAX steal that dubious distinction from San Diego’s Limberger Field. Frankly I want a recount.
5 Likes
The Boring company on line one for you.
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I love O’Hare for the train service. $5 and an hour after landing I’m at Clark & Lake station while other folks are stuck in traffic. As for the airport itself… meh.
3 Likes
LAX and LaGuardia tie for my top worst with Newark not far behind. Decrepit, run down and disgusting. No public transportation options, bizarre terminal layouts, nothing connected airside, cramped hallways. Blegh! It’s an embarrassment for our country when visitors arrive at either one of these shithole airports.
I once sat in the “horseshoe” at LAX for almost an hour. Finally told the Uber driver I’ll get out and walk and glad I did otherwise I would have missed my flight.
10 Likes
There is truly no airport that can rival Changi. That place is thoughtfully decorated, well organized, and generally just lovely.
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Yes. I can (and have) spent hours there just exploring. Only thing it’s missing is a direct train into the city center like Hong Kong.
4 Likes
I do like their 2nd choice Austin TX. It’s about 3 hours from my house, but so is Houston, and traffic can be kind of bad too. Easy to park, a easy walk to the terminal, Ray Benson has a club their. Flights were a bit cheaper out of their as well.
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That pic reminds me of a Douglas Adam’s quote about airports.
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”. Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (…) and the architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of the Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not".”
11 Likes
Yeah, the MRT goes everywhere, but it’s weird that you need to transfer trains to get to/from the airport.
3 Likes
Devil’s Advocate here: LAX as a whole is fine. Not great, but definitely not the worst in the world. The biggest criticism this article leveled against it was that traffic is bad, which is a problem across all of LA including in Burbank which this listmaker conveniently ignored for their top pick. But once you’re at your terminal the experience is unremarkable.
7 Likes
The closest in North America might be Vancouver International. The First Nations art work throughout the terminals makes it almost a pleasure to visit.
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For my money the worst airport in the world is Cairo. Followed by Newark, probably.
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Jomo Kenyatta in Nairobi or Entebbe in Uganda are both pretty grim.
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We also avoid LAX. We live about 1 1/2 miles from Long Beach airport and if we can’t find a flight out of there, we’ll go Orange County.
LAX is one of Dante’s circles of hell.
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What’s wrong with SAN? It’s actually located right downtown and not in the middle of nowhere like 99% of airports (like its replacement if it ever gets built as developers want the prime real estate of the current airport).
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Try the archaic landing flight pattern, and don’t get me started on the take off noise…
If we are including “annoying to get to”/“traffic issues” in the metric of bad airports I don’t know how you could beat LHR. Maybe it’s just the fact that I landed this morning, but 2 hours and about 65 pounds to get to my hotel in the City even using the high speed train is ridiculous.
Cairo is the worst big-city airport qua airport I’ve ever been to. Really bleak and depressing. But I’m sure there are worse ones.
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I hate LAX with a passion.
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