When you’re already tense in an airport, a terse word from a staff member can make you feel worse. Dealing with someone who doesn’t seem to care that your flight is delayed, doesn’t want to help you find your lost luggage, and isn’t into answering your questions: that just makes you feel even more helpless. People turn to review sites to complain about those kinds of reactions (and hopefully, to give praise where it’s due), and a new study from Upgraded Points looked at passenger feedback from Yelp and Google reviews to see which of our 50 busiest airports are doing better in terms of being friendly and helpful—and in terms of being rude and careless.
One interesting takeaway is that only 6 percent of airport reviews mention friendly staff and less than 2 percent mention friendly TSA. But maybe that’s because, in general, we don’t notice friendliness when we’re focused on getting through the airport on time...we just notice the opposite.
Portland International Airport in Oregon is our country's friendliest airport. It received a friendliness score of 44 out of 50. On Yelp, 19 percent of 2,300 passengers’ reviews mention the airport’s friendly staff. Clearly, Portland’s doing something right in creating a climate where staff members enjoy their interactions with passengers and make flying more fun.
In second place is Indianapolis International in Indiana, with a score of 43. More than 10 percent of the combined reviews called out friendly staff, while less than 1 percent of the airport’s Google reviews mention rude TSA staff members.
And in third place is Jacksonville International Airport in Florida with a score of 39. There, nearly 8 percent of combined reviews mentioned friendly staff.
Maybe next time we fly, we’ll try and see if we can coax a smile out of the person repeating endless instructions about what you can and can’t keep in your bag when it goes through security. Their job can be tedious—maybe they think we could be more friendly, too.
The top 10 friendliest airports are:
1. Portland International
2. Indianapolis International
3. Jacksonville International
4. John Wayne Airport, California
5. Pittsburgh International, Pennsylvania
6. Nashville International, Tennessee
7. Raleigh-Durham International, North Carolina
8. Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International, Kentucky
9. Dallas Love Field, Texas
10. Tampa International, Florida