We’re No. 4!

It’s a small victory but after being ranked as the third worst major Canadian airport last year, Edmonton International has improved to fourth worst in this year’s poll of Canadian air travellers.

There’s no point in being parochial about these things: Calgary International has been deemed the country’s least loathsome airport in the same annual Flightnetwork.com poll released last week.

Once again, Toronto’s Pearson International was the popular choice as the worst of Canada’s five highest-traffic airports. The perennial list-topper when it comes to that bottoming distinction, the Toronto airport was deemed the worst by 71 per cent of travellers who responded to the poll. Montreal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport was considered the worst air hub by 13 per cent of travellers, while eight per cent thought the booby prize should rightly go to Vancouver International Airport. Edmonton’s airport, which recently underwent a terminal expansion and amenity upgrades, was ranked the country’s worst by only four per cent of respondents, a fraction more than Calgary’s.

Proving yet again that you can do anything with statistics, nearly half of the respondents also ranked Pearson as the “most improved” airport in Canada. Since Pearson serves more customers than any other airport in Canada — nearly twice as many as the second busiest, Vancouver International — it is the airport where the largest number of people are likely to have had a good, or bad, experience.

By those calculations it seems almost indisputable, then: the City Centre Airport is one of the finest in all of Canada.