There’s a reason Joe Biden compared LaGuardia Airport — named for a mayor who deserved a better institutional remembrance — to “a third-world country” in 2014.
“I’m not joking,” Biden continued.
The reason, of course, is that LaGuardia sucks. Like full-on sucks. To get there without taking a cab you actually have to take a bus, but note that those only leave from Upper Manhattan or Queens. Once you arrive, and if you’re lucky — beat the gridlocked traffic that causes some to walk from their taxis to the airport — good luck finding somewhere to sit comfortably. Lines are legion and the baggage claim areas look like the basement level of an out-of-business mall from the 1980s.
For all these and more, J.D. Power named it North America’s worst in its 2016 North America Airport Satisfaction Study.
As Skift notes, it will be hard for the U.S., and its tax-hating citizens, to match the airport glories of Scandinavia, for example, where bigger public coffers allow for bigger and better sustained infrastruture investments. That said, the airport is in the middle of an $8 billion refurbishment plan, which — equally paradoxically — contributed to reviews even worse than last year, since the only thing passengers hate more than lines are lines in the middle of an airport-cum-construction site.
On the plus side, Portland, Tampa, Las Vegas and Orlando all ranked well; LaGuardia was joined at the bottom by Newark in second-to-last place, Philadelphia, Boston, and O’Hare.
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