Manchester Airport named worst in UK with Liverpool ranked number one

Manchester Airport has released a statement after being named the worst in the UK by Which? magazine.

The magazine released a survey asking nearly 4,000 people about their experiences at UK airports over the past 12 months, naming Liverpool John Lennon Airport as being the best.

Which? members were invited to rate the airports across 11 categories, including seating, staff, toilets and queues at check in, bag drop, passport control and security. 

Its 3,842 members who took part in the survey answered questions about their experiences from June 2022 – June 2023, which does not factor in the most recent summer holiday period.

But Manchester has hit back at the claims taken from the experiences of people who took the Which? survey. The airport slammed it as ‘deeply flawed’ and ‘misleading’.

However, the survey did acknowledge that the airports which came out best all had the fact that they’re quite small in common.

It said, ‘the six airports with a customer score of 70% or more in the table below all served fewer than five million passengers (compared to Heathrow’s 62 million)’.

Manchester Airport is a major airport covering the North West, with 25 million passengers from the region travelling here each year to jet off to its many destinations.

In a lengthy statement, a Manchester Airport spokesperson said: “Manchester Airport is proud to give the people of the North easy and affordable access to a wide range of global destinations.

“We are committed to providing a great experience to all passengers, and feedback this summer has been really positive, building on the strong Christmas and Easter getaways we delivered.

“Our customer service is driven by investment in our people – we have recruited more than 3,000 colleagues since April 2022 and established a new 100-strong resilience team, trained in a variety of roles so they can respond at short-notice to ensure passengers get a good level of service. 

“It is also driven by investment in our facilities, especially the £1.3bn transformation of Terminal 2, through which more than 80% of our passengers will fly by 2025.” 

The airport pointed out that the survey did not cover its service over this summer and that only a fraction of its passengers gave a response, as it continued: “We take all customer feedback seriously, but the Which? survey creates a deeply flawed and misleading picture of the service we are providing to our customers this summer.

“The survey is out of date – covering June 2022-June 2023 and not including the majority of this summer season – and is also based on a tiny and unrepresentative sample of the 25 million passengers who travel through Manchester Airport each year.

“Year-by-year the Which? survey becomes less and less relevant as response rates continue to dwindle, with half as many people surveyed this year as were 12 months ago.

“There were only 567 responses relating to Manchester Airport – 0.002% of our annual passenger numbers.”

It added: “As part of our commitment to delivering great customer service, we continually survey passengers. In July and August this year, 93% of those passengers rated their overall satisfaction with the service they received as good, very good or excellent.

“Since April this year, we have welcomed more than 10.4m people through Manchester Airport, who have travelled to more than 180 destinations with nearly 50 different airlines – and 95.6% of them have got through security in under 15 minutes.

“Almost three quarters got through security in under five minutes and 99.8% in under 30 minutes.”

The survey revealed Terminal 1 scored 44% with a number of one and two star ratings, but got three stars for the range of shops it has on offer. 

Meanwhile, Terminal 2 scored 50% with no lower than two stars in any category, and managed a good score of four stars for queues at the check in desk. Though it still remained in the bottom five.

But, Terminal 3 scored 38%, receiving a particularly poor customer grade. Its star ratings failed to offer a single redeeming feature, as one customer commented that ‘the whole experience is generally unpleasant’.

Manchester Airport ranked among the worst in the survey for security queues, with an average reported wait time of 28 minutes reported at Terminal 3, 26 minutes at Terminal 2 and 25 minutes at Terminal 1.

Only Birmingham Airport performed worse for this, with an average reported wait time of 29 minutes.