The perfect airport trip involves walking straight through security, buying an overpriced coffee on your way to your gate (which has already been called), scanning your boarding pass and walking straight onto the plane. Unfortunately, the reality is much less efficient, and sometimes even comes with a dreaded cancelled flight.
But, believe it or now, there are some airports out there where queues are short, the food is good, and planes arrive when they’re meant to. And, according to new research, several of them are in Scandinavia.
Scandinavian airports come out on top
Airport transfer comparison site Hoppa has done some digging into which airports across Europe you can and can’t rely on. In order to create a ranking, Hoppa compared stats about average flight delay times, percentage of cancelled flights, security queue lengths, access to lounges and places to sit, giving each airport a score for each category before calculating an overall score out of 10.
The best airport in Europe, according to all that data? Copenhagen Airport!
Copenhagen received a near-perfect score of 9.5 out of 10, excelling in pretty much every category. Delays to departures are only eight minutes on average, and nine minutes for arrivals. By the time you’d noticed there was a delay, it would already be over.
In the unlikely event that you are held up, you’ve got 40 restaurants, cafés and bars to choose from, some of which sell local cuisine like smørrebrød, a traditional Danish open sandwich to give you one last taste of Denmark before you leave.
Copenhagen wasn’t the only airport to get that overall score of 9.5 – Stockholm Arlanda managed it too, meaning they came in joint first position. Departure delays at Stockholm are a very slightly longer 8.3 minutes, but parking is cheap and its amenities include, among others, a pharmacy and a chapel, which allowed it to remain firmly alongside its Danish sibling.
It was down south for third place, which went to Palma de Mallorca. At 9.3 out of 10, this Spanish airport had an impressive average arrival delay time of only 6.8 minutes. Palma Airport has recently gone through a massive refurbishment, which could be helping with its timeliness.
Read on for the full list of the best airports in Europe from Hoppa, including their overall scores out of 10.
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