6 airports you don't want to get stuck in

Carlos Ortiz / Getty Images

A traveler sleeps on a baggage carousel at Chicago's Midway Airport after flights were canceled during a December 2005 snowstorm.

By By Sascha Segan, Frommers.com

Many airports are awful. Some are lovely, like the 10 prettiest airport terminals we profiled last week. But most are at best joyless econoboxes, at worst purgatorial warehouses of stalled lives.

Some airports deserve special condemnation, though. In some cases, they deserve to be literally condemned. Assembling this top 10 list of misfits, I scanned professional surveys and delay statistics and asked my frequent-traveler friends to come up with the 10 airports where you'd least like to spend an extra hour.

I'm sticking to major airports here. There are small airports around the world that consist of a shanty that swelters in the summer and freezes in the winter, with a hole in the wall for baggage claim and a single sad concession stand. (I'm actually describing my experience at Udaipur Airport in India in 1999.) But that's not fair. These 10 airports should deliver better service, and they don't.?

Frommers.com slideshow: More tragic terminals

Chicago Midway Airport
Chicago's Midway airport ranked as the nation's worst for on-time departures in the most recent federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics data, earning it a spot on this list. It isn't a bad place to hang out, with a new food court and a frequent subway connection to downtown Chicago, but any airport is the worst airport if you're stuck there and you aren't getting on a plane.

Consider this the least-worst of our set of bad airports. Midway's curse may come more from Chicago's notoriously difficult weather than from any problem the airport itself can fix.

"Paris" Beauvais Airport, France
A solid fifty miles north of Paris, this depressing low-cost box of an airport in Picardy got saddled with a bait-and-switch name by Ryanair, the ultimate bait-and-switch airline. It rated as one of the world's worst airports by Frommers.com friends SleepingInAirports.net because of its lack of seating, lack of services, and general half-tent, half-warehouse atmosphere.

It lacks a rail link to Paris and closes overnight, so hope that your flight doesn't get too delayed, or you may be camping out on the lawn.

LaGuardia Airport US Airways Terminal, New York City
I don't hate LaGuardia, but it was recently rated the worst major airport in America by both JD Power and Associates and Zagat Survey, so who am I to argue?

LaGuardia has no rail link to anywhere -- even between its own terminals -- and regularly suffers from congestion, overcrowding, and delays. While its terminals are shaping up, they're still each smaller and with fewer services than you'd expect from an airport at one of the top tourist destinations in the world.

I'm giving the US Airways Terminal the worst-terminal award here because at least the central terminal has an atrium and the Delta terminal just got some new food options. The US Airways terminal is dull and sad.

Moscow Sheremtyevo Airport Terminal B/C, Russia
One of the two airports rated "two stars" by global consulting firm Skytrax (nobody got one star), SVO B/C got particularly bad marks for anything where you have to interact with airport staff: their attitude, their language skills, and the speed with which they process passengers.?

Reviewers suggest that you brush up on your Russian if you intend to transfer flights, because signboards and staff tend not to work in English. Apparently, you can fix up a Russian airport, but it's harder to fix up Russian customer service. (In capitalist Russia, customer services you!)

Depressingly, SVO Terminal B/C is partially a new terminal, but it still got one or two-star rankings from Skytrax on "leisure facilities," "baggage hall," and "meet and greet." It's also several miles away from the rest of the airport and from its rail station, making inter-terminal connections difficult. Air France cautions "Take official claims of short transfer times with a pinch of salt: delays of up to two hours have been reported."

Manila Airport Terminal 1, Philippines
Last May, the ceiling at Manila airport's Terminal 1 caved in, injuring two people. That's part of why Sleeping in Airports rated it the world's worst terminal last year.

"The terminal has been a frequent target of criticism with travellers and the business community complaining it is congested, run-down and filthy, with toilets that do not work," Agence France Presse commented. According to SleepingInAirports.net, bribery and theft are also rampant in the terminal.

The negative press attention seems to have had some effect; this November the Philippine government said it would renovate the terminal starting in January. It looks like changes can't come too soon.

JFK Airport Terminal 3, New York City
In 1960, Pan American Airlines built the Worldport: a grand, flying-saucer-shaped gateway to the Jet Age.

Fifty one years later, this decrepit, crumbling chunk of concrete is still used by Delta as an international hub. Terminal 3 is the worst single airport terminal in America, and probably in the Western world. Even Delta acknowledges this: they're tearing it down and replacing it with a giant glass structure connected to the nearby Terminal 4. It's unsalvageable.

Terminal 3 is known for endless immigration lines in a dank basement, for an utter lack of food and shopping options, three crowded and confusing entry points, hallways that could have been designed by M.C Escher and for vomiting international travelers out onto an underground sidewalk with no cabs available. There's also a sense that the cleaning crew gave up in despair a while ago.

JFK's terminals range from the awful to the mediocre, but Delta's hubs take the rotten, worm-infested cake. Right next to T3 there's Terminal 2, an ugly box with an undermanned security line where I really hope you're never caught hungry.

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