Photo by Noe Todorovich
In the D.C. area, travelers often prefer flying out of National Airport—mostly for its convenience (it’s the only regional airport accessible by Metro, and closest to D.C.)—rather than the suburbia sequestered Dulles Airport.
But a recent analysis suggests that people don’t just prefer other regional airports to Dulles, they actually hate Dulles. The analysis, which was conducted by Priceonomics, ranks the best and worst major airports in the world. Priceonomics analyzed almost 17,000 reviews of airports from all of the world on the website Skytrax and came up with a ranking of the best and worst airports by overall quality, wait times, cleanliness, shopping opportunities, and more. Naturally, this is but one analysis based off thousands of reviews, so like any ranking, take it with a grain of salt.
The basic trend is that foreign airports are favored far more than American ones, with Dulles being eighth-worst overall airport, just behind Miami and London-Stansted. Moreover, the analysis ranked Dulles as the fourth worst airport for wait times.
Neither National Airport nor Baltimore-Washington Airport were anywhere to be found on the lists, so your best bet is to probably fly out of one those airports.