Toronto Pearson ranked second-last in airport customer satisfaction survey

A new survey has landed Pearson Airport back in the doghouse.
The travel hub was ranked second-last on customer satisfaction among North American mega airports in a poll released Wednesday from consumer insights company J.D. Power. Only New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport was ranked lower.
Out of the 20 mega airports — defined as those with 33 million or more passengers per year — included in the survey, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport ranked highest. Detroit and Phoenix were second and third. No Canadian airport other than Pearson qualified under the mega category.
But in the large category — airports that handle between 10 million and 32.9 million passengers per year — other Canadian airports took a hit as well. Out of the 27 airports considered, Vancouver was ranked highest at 15. Calgary was ranked 22nd and Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau went second-last. Philadelphia’s airport was ranked the worst.
The study was based on 26,290 completed surveys of U.S. and Canadian residents who travelled through at least one airport in the past 30 days. It asked passengers to rate their experience across seven categories: ease of travel, level of trust, facilities, staff, experience getting to and from the airport, and the food, beverage and retail offerings.
In a statement to the Star, a Pearson airport spokesperson criticized the study’s methodology. It was “heavily skewed toward U.S. travellers,” the spokesperson said, and didn’t verify if they actually travelled through Pearson.
“Toronto Pearson values performance assessments, but we rely on industry-approved standards,” the spokesperson said. In one such assessment, Pearson was named the best North American airport with over 40 million passengers, according to the spokesperson.
But Pearson has been through tumultuous times in the recent past. In the summer of 2022, a whopping 52.5 per cent of flights out of Pearson were delayed — the most in the world and nearly seven per cent higher than the next-closest airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Pearson also ranked fourth globally for flight cancellations.
Experts largely attributed the problems to the airlines, who they said sold more seats than the airport could accommodate.
In its statement, Pearson said it is working on a multibillion dollar investment in the airport to “address passenger growth demands while readying Canada’s largest airport for the future of air travel.”