The Best and Worst Airports of 2022
San Francisco and Sacramento top The Wall Street Journal’s rankings for large and midsize airports; Newark and LaGuardia rank last
San Francisco International Airport sure tries hard to make travelers forget they’re in an airport. The place is oddly quiet, even during rush hour, due to strict limitations on overhead announcements about lost items, gate changes and boarding groups. Signs urge travelers to use headphones as they traverse the terminal and wait for flights.
Passengers can retreat to yoga rooms, a museum, art exhibits and outposts of local restaurants like Bun Mee and Boudin Bakery, or catch occasional live music. New touchless water-filling stations have hot, cold and room temperature settings and might soon dispense free seltzer.
It’s all scant comfort when flights are delayed — a chronic problem given the city’s signature fog — but a topper to a great airport experience when things go well. And things have been going unusually well at SFO since travel began rebounding in 2021.
The airport has been running on-time rates of more than 80%, a solid 10 points higher than prepandemic levels despite major travel troubles in other cities.
The one-two punch of more reliable flights and top-notch amenities vaulted the airport to first place in The Wall Street Journal’s first ranking of the country’s busiest airports since 2019. Atlanta and Minneapolis filled out the top three.
Each stands out in a time of upheaval in the travel industry as the crush of passengers, combined with shortages of labor and planes, bring back familiar travel frustrations like long security lines, flight cancellations and pricey airline tickets.
This year’s airport report card ranks the 50 largest U.S. airports on 19 factors from on-time performance and security waits to J.D. Power customer-satisfaction score and ticket prices. Reliability matters most to passengers and carries the most weight in our rankings.
The airports are divided in two categories: the 20 biggest, by number of passengers, and the next 30, categorized as midsize.
Sacramento International Airport, just 100 miles northeast of SFO and a competitor for some Northern California fliers, nabbed the top spot among midsize airports and the highest score overall.
Airport director Cindy Nichol, who used to work at San Francisco International, attributes Sacramento’s high score to good weather, plenty of runway space and customer service.
The airport’s landscapers even pitch in to direct travelers, she says, earning passenger compliments.
The San Diego and San Jose airports were Nos. 2 and 3 among midsize airports, creating a California trifecta.
The worst performers in the large and midsize classes, respectively, were Newark and LaGuardia Airport. Both are plagued by flight delays and other issues but have big plans for fixes.
LaGuardia’s physical makeover is already well under way and you won’t recognize the place if it’s been a while. And Newark’s new Terminal A makes its debut in early December.
It says a lot about the complexity of air travel that airports at the top or bottom of our rankings didn’t shine or stink in every area.
San Francisco and Minneapolis had among the highest domestic ticket prices in the country. Washington Dulles, Charlotte, N.C., and Salt Lake City topped the list.
Florida airports, which fared poorly overall due to congested airspace, had the lowest ticket prices due to intense competition from budget carriers like Spirit Airlines.
Let’s also not forget the industry is effectively graded on a curve on many metrics: an 80% on-time rate still means 20% of flights were tardy. And the U.S. government’s definition of an on-time flight — those that arrive and depart less than 15 minutes behind schedule — would make Swiss watchmakers shudder.
San Francisco’s top ranking is sure to be a head-scratcher for travelers who have been fogged in there over the years.
But it makes perfect sense to Sean Swalin, who has only known San Francisco in its punctual days.
The 49-year-old corporate real-estate executive moved to the city from the East Coast during the pandemic and has only rave reviews. He travels weekly and has had only minor flight delays and one cancellation, the latter due to a pilot’s nosebleed.
Mr. Swalin finds the airport easy to navigate from parking through security, and loves the multiple security checkpoints, which eliminate bottlenecks that develop at airports with centralized screening.
“It is a dream,” says Mr. Swalin, whose previous home airports were Philadelphia and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
San Francisco Airport director Ivar Satero, who has worked there for nearly 30 years and run the place for the past six, says the airport has made adjustments to reduce delays and cancellations.
Those include adopting recent Federal Aviation Administration landing procedures allowing the use of both parallel runways in low visibility and investing $10 million in new GPS landing technology.
When bad weather struck one day in early November, the airport handled 37 flight arrivals an hour thanks to new GPS technology, the airport says. It handles 60 an hour on a normal day.
“Five years ago it would have been down to 25 flights an hour,” says airport spokesman Doug Yakel, who worked in operations for Virgin America and United Airlines before joining the airport in 2010.
Mr. Satero says those systems and other improvements, including additional gates, will help the airport manage operations when business fully returns, which he expects in the next two years.
Before the pandemic, the airport was investing to handle a projected 72 million passengers, from 58 million at that time. This year, about 40 million passengers will pass through.
Mr. Satero said he is encouraged by how smoothly operations are running during morning rush hour, when traffic can be as busy as it was before the pandemic.
Whether San Francisco can retain its crown is questionable. The airport improvements will continue at the big spending city-owned airport, but the on-time stats may not hold up.
That’s because the big improvement in reliability has been fueled not by airport magic but by a pandemic hangover.
The number of flights and passengers at SFO, where United has a hub, are still down sharply from 2019 in contrast to most major airports. Both metrics were down more than 25% for the year through August, according to airport statistics.
United chief executive Scott Kirby calls it the least-recovered major air travel market in the country.
He blames the slow travel recovery in San Francisco on the region’s technology companies, which haven’t restored business travel to prepandemic levels and likely won’t anytime soon, given recent belt tightening and continuing Covid restrictions in key Asian markets, especially China.
Hong Kong, the airport’s second-largest international market after London before the pandemic, only recently reopened. Cathay Pacific recently resumed service but with a fraction of its usual flights. Qantas, Air China and China Eastern have yet to return.
Fewer flights means less congestion, plus a cushion when weather issues or other trouble arises. Instead of weather delays rippling past midnight, Mr. Kirby says, airlines can catch up more quickly.
He visited San Francisco earlier this month and says employees there were giddy about the airline’s performance and hopeful it will continue. “Everything about [the airport] feels different.”
Mr. Kirby says the lesson in San Francisco’s strong showing is that an airport shines when it operates a reasonable number of flights relative to its capacity.
“When they were given a hand of cards that they could win, they won,” he says.
When flights are overscheduled, Mr. Kirby says, “it’s a guaranteed bad experience for customers.”
Exhibit A, Newark, where United also has a hub.
Mr. Kirby has been pressing the FAA to enforce flight limits at the New Jersey airport and made flight cutbacks of its own during the summer to ease congestion.
Newark airport officials say the number of flights depends on the FAA, and the airport can only do its best to be supportive of the operations.
The FAA says it doesn’t have enforcement authority at Newark, and that the demand for takeoff and landing timings at Newark is managed through voluntary cooperation and schedule adjustments agreed on by airlines and the FAA.