Miami, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood rank on angry airports list
Passengers line up for boarding passes for flights on Southwest Airlines at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Friday, April 14, 2023.
We’ve all been here at the airport — grounded, steamed, stuck in a TSA line moving slower than rush hour traffic on 95.
We’re behind passengers who have never heard of getting their ID ready while in the queue 45 minutes ago. Or maybe our bags apparently are still on Hawaii standard time. And now our delayed flight is … canceled?!
It’s enough to make an airport traveler angry. Really angry. So angry that we need to post on Twitter right now.
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Forbes Advisor has compiled and analyzed those frustrated tweets from angry passengers — some 37,000 tweets across 60 airports — to see which airports have the angriest travelers and what are the most common issues travelers are experiencing.
The key findings at airports
▪ Miami International Airport ranked No. 4 for airports with the least angry travelers — and it was tied with Newark Liberty International Airport and John Glenn Columbus International Airport, according to Forbes analysts.
Travelers in Indianapolis, Seattle-Tacoma, and Kansas City are the least angry.
MIA ranked 47th for airport garnering the most angry tweets. “Only 47% of the tweets directed to the airport were angry and the most common words/complaints found in the frustrated tweets were ‘Hours, International, Line, TSA, Waiting,’” according to a Forbes survey spokeswoman.
▪ Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport ranked 26th angriest airport, with 52% of angry tweets directed to the airport citing the words: “Delays, Traffic, Line, Hours, Delayed.”
▪ Florida’s angriest airports: Two Sunshine State airports ranked among the Top 10 angriest — Jacksonville International Airport (No. 2) and Tampa International Airport (No. 4).
In addition to MIA (47th) and FLL (26th), Southwest Florida International Airport in the Fort Myers area of Lee County (No. 23) and Orlando International Airport (No. 31) also ranked on the angry list.
▪ John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, angers its travelers more than any other, according to Forbes analysts. Travelers at the airport named for “The Longest Day” and “True Grit” actor, used these words the most to indicate their displeasure: “Noise, Staff, TSA, Complaints, Delayed.”
▪ The world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, is the sixth most anger-inducing in the country. With nearly 94 million passengers passing through Hartsfield–Jackson in 2022, an increase of 23.8% over 2021, according to Fox 5, that’s a lot of Twitter accounts.
▪ More than half of tweets from travelers — 52% — that use the tag symbol, @, to mention an airport are angry. Well, yeah, we tend to use social media to gripe more than to post, “Hey, my bag is first out of the chute and I can get the [expletive] out of this lovely airport.”
▪ The three most commonly used words in angry airport tweets are: delays, security, hours.
KNOW MORE: FAA unruly passengers a national trend in 2021
Top 10 angriest airports
1. John Wayne Airport, Orange County, California.
2. Jacksonville International Airport, Florida.
3. Eppley Airfield, Omaha.
4. Tampa International Airport, Florida.
5. San Antonio International Airport.
6. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
7. San Diego International Airport.
8. Nashville International Airport.
9. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, Phoenix, Arizona.
10. Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport, San Jose.
How Forbes did the survey
Forbes analyzed tweets starting in March 2023 and looked back at the preceding 12 months. So the April flood from the historic 1-in-a-1,000-year storm at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood that led to a two-day closure of the airport is not a part of this survey period.
When applying its mathematical methodology, the tweets had to be directed at one of the airports using the @ “mentioning” or “tagging” character to cite the official Twitter handle of the airport in its message.
So if an airport among the 60 busiest didn’t have an official Twitter handle, like Kahului Airport in Maui and two others, or wasn’t tweeted at more than 50 times over the year, which included Palm Beach International Airport and three others, it was one of the seven excluded.
