Voted the worst in the UK, again and again and again and again
Another year, and another Which? league table of the UK’s airports that puts Manchester last. Or, to be exact, last, second-to-last, and fourth-to-last. The survey actually rates airport terminals, of which Manchester has three. London’s Luton Airport and London Stansted mix it up in the bottom five. Stansted, of course, is owned by the same parent company as Manchester.
A sense of deja vu
Each year Which? produces a league table of the best and worst airports in the UK. Each year, the lower-ranked airports cry foul.
Manchester’s MD said that the survey “bears no resemblance to the experience people receive at Manchester Airport, day in, day out”. He also said, “We have created a world-class and award-winning Terminal 2”.
No one likes getting negative reviews, and their triggering is understandable, but calling T2 world-class is perhaps pushing credibility. MAN is not Changi, or Doha. There are no UK airports in the SKYTRAXX annual best airports list. Even the international airport body, the ACI, of which MAN is a member of sorts, hasn’t given them an award in their annual ASQ awards.
Their surprising 2022 win of the Prix Versailles list meant that Terminal 2 was considered one of the world’s most beautiful airports.
Survey this
The airport has stated that it surveyed 3,045 people between January and June this year, and 91 per cent of those asked rated the airport as good, very good, or excellent.
- The MAN survey represents 0.0196% of passengers who travelled through MAN during that period. (Assuming the 30m annual travellers that MAN quotes are spread out neatly over the half year. The reality is that they probably skew more into the second half.)
- They, unlike Which?, give no indication as to how these respondents were selected for the surveys, nor the structure of the survey, or even how the surveys were conducted.
The reality is that no one who has travelled through MAN would believe that 91% of passengers rated the airport positively. 60%, maybe, at a push, if you picked the sample strategically.
We’ve just returned from a trip that saw us fly out of the ageing T1 and back into the newer T2. The experience was mixed. It wasn’t truly horrible (the sick on the floor of the T2 toilets was pretty grim), but it also wasn’t “world class”. That really is a comical and wholly unnecessary statement to make.
I think sometimes MAN, and other airports, believe that if they even get closer to hitting the basics of what an airport should deliver, then they should be applauded for it. Launching a new restaurant should mean that we forget about the expensive car parking. Don’t think too much about the toilets, we have added a third duty-free concession. Unfortunately, that’s just not how it works.
Where is the truth?
It’s worth considering other sources for ratings. No approach to rating anything will ever be perfect, and in fact can be deeply imperfect, but it could give us an idea of whether the Which? or the MAN data is the outlier
- Skytrax rates Manchester Airport as 2 out of 10, with 1,389 reviews
- Out of 9,456 reviews on Facebook, 60% of people “recommend” the airport
- 31,337 reviews on Google give the airport an average score of 3.1
- 27,502 reviews on Trustpilot give the airport an average rating of 1.5
That does suggest that the Which? data is in the right place, and that MAN’s 91% is perhaps skewed somehow.
The real challenge with most ratings is that you are more likely to post a review if you had a negative experience rather than a positive one. That’s why I think the Which? approach of asking people about their experiences over the last twelve months is actually better.
However, I don’t think their approach is perfect. A bigger sample size and taking more of the rating criteria out of a survey, and instead using data would help.
Is Manchester Airport really that bad?
There are two factors at play when you consider how good or bad Manchester Airport is:
- Firstly, what are we comparing it to?
- Secondly, and this is of the least importance to anyone flying from MAN right now, the past versus the future.
What do people really want from an airport?
What should you compare an airport to? How long is too long when it comes to getting through security? Is it ever ok to have just a single security scanner active?
The reality is that people want travel to be pretty seamless. The comparison, for every airport, is against a pretty basic set of requirements. That’s fast check-in, fast security, a good selection of places to eat at a reasonable price, and facilities that are clean and functioning. Check-in might be run by a third party, but passengers are still going to call the airport out if it’s slow.
When you consider how basic those requirements are, it doesn’t seem unfair if people are unhappy when you don’t hit them. Before someone has even entered the terminal, they may have paid quite a staggering amount of money for parking. Their expectation that their airport experience will be good is then raised.
A better future?
MAN are vocal about just how much money they are spending on making the airport better. The problem is that they don’t necessarily make the right decisions, nor are they always focused on passenger experience versus the ability to earn more money from passengers.
The ongoing Transformation Programme seems to be spiralling out of control as it reaches its conclusion. Coming soon is a whole host of shops and restaurants. They’re also planning on closing the one semi-decent lounge in Terminal 2 (the 1903 lounge).
BA is due to move to T2 soon, which will be much better than T3, but there’s been a lot of chatter about passengers on these flights being bused to the terminal. That would be a horrible experience. Every positive seems to bring a negative. That move may even be delayed to a point where the BA lounge in T3 ceases to exist at all.
That would mean BA would have gone from having their own lounge to using the shared Escape lounge, to a hybrid lounge in the old 1903 space, back to Escape, to a hallway that was converted into a lounge, and ultimately, premium passengers would now just receive vouchers for food and drink.
If you’re not familiar with MAN then the above gives you an indication of why some people believe they aren’t the best at strategic planning.
And here’s the kicker. You can talk about the future all you want, but people will rate you based on their experience today, or last week, or month. No one is going to give you extra kudos because you claim that the airport will be better next year.
MAN also have a lounge problem, or to flip that an opportunity. Emirates is due to move from T1 to T2. Their T1 lounge is currently the best at the airport. The hope is that they will have a lounge at T2, and it will be even better. There’s even talk of being able to board straight from the flight.
There’s also talk about a new, premium lounge opening in T2. This will cater to the many, many airlines that are due to be in T2 and that have business class cabins. Of course, good news brings bad. MAN have announced that their 1903 lounge in T2 will close. Right now, that’s the best lounge in that terminal. Why are they closing this space? Only MAG knows.
The opportunity for the airport is to cater to premium passengers better. That means working hand-in-hand with airlines to give them the space to create a great lounge. We’re not expecting a world-class lounge, just something half decent. That could mean an openworld lounge at Manchester, although that seems less likely. Where we may end up is a lounge for premium passengers only i.e. no paid entry. The hope is that this is not run by MAG.
The verdict: who is in the right, Which? or MAN?
Both. The Which? survey is too small, and Manchester Airport is one of the worst in the UK. That’s the cold, stark reality that MAN faces.
The good news, for MAN at least, is that they have little to no competition in their catchment area. Liverpool Airport is often lauded as a better option, but almost all of its flights are to holiday destinations. You can’t fly to Singapore, Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi (to name but a few) from LPL. Leeds Bradford is the same. Complain all we like, most people will continue to go back to Manchester Airport if it’s the easiest or fastest option.
My experience of MAN, which goes back thirty years, is that the airport has seen a steady decline across all areas. A new coffee shop or WH Smiths does not make a poor travel experience better, and that experience has got worse and worse over the years.
Long periods of under-investment, the decline in North American traffic, and an over-reliance (like most UK airports) on budget airlines have led the airport to where it is now.
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