The most stressful airports in the country for travelers ranked in new study
It is not uncommon for the experience of catching a flight to leave some passengers as a nervous wreck, with extra fees, cancellations and ever-changing airline rules often making the whole experience highly stressful.
While lots of people experience some form of aviophobia, a fear of flying, some airports are becoming known for leaving travelers in an angry and anxious state before they have even seen their plane.
Alongside frequent flight delays, problems with getting to the airport, or even through the terminal and its waiting TSA officers, has made some of these travel hubs across the US into nightmare fuel for nervous flyers, according to analysis by ground transport firm Mozio.
Travelers have seen a spike in these frustrations in recent years, as ongoing issues with staffing in Air Traffic Control and its knock on effect on flights around the country have caused a number of infuriating delays for passengers. But some airports are much worse than others.
Advert
The most stressful airport for passengers, according to Mozio's analysis of common stressors for travelers like delays, parking costs, and difficulty of getting to the airport, is actually Chicago's O'Hare International.
With a stress score of 8.42 out of 10, O'Hare has become the most stressful airport in America, by Mozio's metrics, with 25.4 percent of flights experiencing some form of delay at one of America's busiest travel hubs.
Compounding this is the cost of parking your car at the international airport, with a space costing $43 per day - and it taking over an hour to drive into the city from the airport thanks to its location far to the north of the Illinois city.
But while many flyers who have passed through O'Hare are able to corroborate these frustrations, Mozio's analysis revealed a suprising east-west divide across the US with the other worst-offenders all located in one region.
Close behind Chicago's O'Hare was, likely to few people's surprise, was New York's LaGuardia Airport with a score of 7.54.
The Queens travel hub easily outstripped its competitors in terms of parking fees, with motorists charged an eye-watering $80 per day to park their vehicle at the airport. Making matters worse for passengers, LaGuardia actually has an even higher number of delays than O'Hare.
26.3 percent of all flights into the largely domestic airport have been delayed in the past year, and once travelers have recovered their vehicle from its 80 dollar parking space, it takes them close to an hour to get into Manhattan proper.
Sadly for New Yorkers, the two other airports serving the city made up third and fourth place in Mozio's analysis as John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport each scored 7.19, thanks to their own stress-inducing difficulties
While both charge $70 per day to park and involve an hour's drive to get into the city, without traffic, both JFK and Newark saw significantly fewer delays than LaGuardia, with less than a quarter of flights turning up late and over 76 percent jetting off within 15 minutes.
That is not to say that every airport is racked with delays and pricey parking fees, at the other end of Mozio's scale, Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport was found to be the least stressful by a significant margin, with a stress score of 1.76 thanks to its cheap parking and only 19 percent of flights experiencing delays.
William Morgan