Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong Soar in Best Airport Poll

A confidential poll has rated Singapore Changi, Seoul Incheon and Hong Kong International as the best airports in the world.

The poll found London Heathrow inferior to Calcutta, Moscow and Johannesburg, coming in at 99th in the table of the world's 146 principal airports, with passengers complaining of long security queues and poor “ambience”.

The Times newspaper also discovered that, despite decades of innovation in air travel, it now takes about 23 minutes longer to fly from Heathrow to Paris that it did in 1979.

The paper published figures from Euro control, the European air traffic regulator, which show that Heathrow’s average delay per flight has quadrupled over the past decade, rising from three to 12 minutes between 1998 and 2009.

The airport runs at 98 percent capacity and handles 66 million passengers a year. So there is only a two percent leeway to cope with any crises.

A spokesman for BAA, which owns Heathrow, told Telegraph Travel, “Heathrow has made significant progress over the past year improving our performance, particularly compared to other European hub airports. Clearly there is more that we can do."

(Source: TravelMole Asia 31 March 2011)