London Gatwick named world's most stressful airport - Travel

May 03, 2024

As if travel wasn't hard enough.

I still remember my first experience at Los Angeles International airport.

Friends had warned me that it was intense, but I naively thought that, as a seasoned traveller, I would be fine. How wrong I was. Everyone’s shoes had to come off, laptops out and gels out, insane queues, rechecking in luggage and don’t even get me started on group boarding and sitting 20 rows apart from your hand luggage.

Research from VisaGuide has named the 10 most stressful airports in the world according to 1,642 passengers from all over the world who made at least two international flights in 2023. The survey measured airports against key stressors including high passenger volumes, vast and intricate airport layouts, congestion within airports, flight delays and distance from city centres.

According to VisaGuide, London Gatwick Airport is the world’s most stressful airport to travel through. Gatwick is London’s secondary international airport and in 2023, 40.9 million passengers passed through the facility. The bulk of this was made up of 19 million people travelling on an easyJet flight. “The small size of Gatwick Airport compared to the large number of passengers leads to crowding and often causes flight delays, making it the most stressful airport in the world,” explained Dion Pllana, Global Travel Trends Analyst at VisaGuide.

Unsurprisingly, half of the world’s top 10 most stressful airports are in Europe and the US.

Second on the list is Turkey’s Istanbul Airport. According to OAG, the world’s leading data platform for the global travel industry, Istanbul is Europe’s busiest airport with over 22.6 million scheduled airline capacity in 2023.

Travellers claim Istanbul Airport is challenging to navigate due to its enormous size. Which is fair enough given it’s over 76 million square metres.

Munich Airport in Germany comes in third, despite Germans’ legacy for efficiency. But in this instance, Germany’s bustling hub is one of the most stress-inducing amidst its extensive facilities and operations.

The top five is rounded out by Denver International Airport and London’s other airport with Heathrow.

“Both airports are known for a high number of daily and annual passengers with Denver hosting 69,286,461 last year, while Heathrow witnessed 61,614,508 travellers in the same year,” says Pllana. Because of its vast expanse, travellers passing through Denver encounter an additional challenge: finding their way through its facilities.

On the other hand, Heathrow is considerably smaller causing slow passenger flow and crowds, especially in peak seasons and holidays. The airport is also known for delays and flight cancellations, and more recently frequent strikes and staff shortages. According to VisaGuide, Heathrow is expected to host a whopping 81.4 million passengers in 2024.

But a high volume of passengers doesn’t necessarily cause chaos. OAG’s senior analyst, John Grant, explains that every airport has its own unique structure of capacity and networks of destinations served.

“Atlanta is a huge domestic airport with large amounts of traffic purely within the US while Dubai is 100 per cent international traffic of which over 50 per cent connects through the airport each year. That said, every airport regardless of scale has developed the necessary infrastructures to accommodate the demand and in many cases airports are constant building sites as they develop further and further adding more and more destinations,” says Grant.

“Airports are more than just a facility for passengers and arriving, they are truly centres of economic activity frequently having business parks, logistic centres and conference facilities close by to serve the regional needs of businesses throughout their regions.”

This story originally appeared on escape.com.au and has been published here with permission.