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Ranked: these are the UK’s best (and worst) airports for 2022

Planning your next trip abroad? Here are the terminals you should be flying from this year

Sophie Dickinson
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Sophie Dickinson
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The UK’s airports haven’t exactly been the chillest places to be recently. What with flight cancellations, endless queues and passport issues, getting away on holiday has become something of a trial, to say the least. That means anything you can do to make your trip less stressful will be very welcome indeed. Like, say, choosing the best and most reliable airport possible.

Happily, The Daily Telegraph has just come up with a brand-new ranking of the UK’s best (and worst) places to fly from in 2022. The study’s authors took the UK’s 16 busiest airports, and looked at everything from the design of the terminals to the wifi connection to the likelihood of delays.

So where came top? That would be London City Airport. Sure, it doesn’t serve as wide a range of destinations as Heathrow or Manchester, but it is a hell of a lot more chic. It gained points for its ample number of charging points (1,771, to be precise) and the fact that nearly 90 percent of its flights arrived on time. Pretty damn good. 

Next up was Gatwick Airport, scoring highly for the number of destinations served (192) and the range of nearby hotels, slipping up slightly due to its lack of decent restaurants. Heathrow and Newcastle came joint third: the former for its stunning architecture, and the latter for its cheap journey into the city centre from the airport. Newcastle was, however, the only airport that doesn’t offer water refill stations. 

In joint last place are Bristol and Leeds Bradford. The former has an extortionate drop-off charge of £7 (as in, the money you have to pay literally just to drop someone off at the airport). As for Leeds Bradford, it ranked poorly due to the the number of cancelled flights; more than 2 percent of all trips were axed last year. 

Wondering where to book your next flight from? Here are the UK’s best (and worst) airports for 2022:

1. London City 

2. Gatwick

3. Heathrow

= Newcastle

5. East Midlands

6. Luton

7. Birmingham 

8. Liverpool 

9. Edinburgh

10. Aberdeen

11. Manchester

12. Stansted

13. Glasgow 

14. Belfast International 

15. Bristol 

= Leeds Bradford

Got five minutes to spare? Want to tell us what life is like in your city? Take the Time Out Index survey here.

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