Exeter Airport has been officially ranked as the happiest airport in the world when it comes to customer experience.
HappyOrNot (www.happy-or-not.com), the company responsible for creating the globally-recognisable ‘Smiley’ feedback system, has just published its inaugural Airport Report based on 158 million data-points from HappyOrNot smiley terminals in 160 airports across 36 countries.
It shows that passengers travelling through Exeter Airport are the happiest in the world, with a score of 88.66% compared to an average across all airports of 76.52%.
The eight happiest airports globally were:
1 Exeter Airport, U.K. – 88.66%
2= Cork Airport, Republic of Ireland – 88.45%
2= Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport (Rome), Italy – 88.45%
4 Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, U.S.A. – 87.35%
5 Newcastle International Airport, U.K. – 87.05%
6 London Southend Airport, U.K. – 86.79%
7 Cardiff Airport, U.K. – 86.57%
8 Keflavik International Airport, Iceland – 86.35%
Exeter Airport’s Managing Director, Matt Roach, said: “The HappyOrNot units around the airport have proven to be a very effective and simple way to evaluate our passengers’ experiences. Our staff do their very best to ease the journey for the travellers and this shows in the consistently high positive ratings. I am very proud of the performance reflected in the responses, and the magnificent achievement of being in the top spot in the world.”
Andrew Bell, Chief Executive of Regional & City Airports, which owns Exeter Airport, said: “This is a tremendous achievement by Exeter Airport and underpins the customer-focused ethos that we promote across our regional UK airport network. We’re very proud to see Exeter ranked number one from 160 airports worldwide.”
Ville Levaniemi, HappyOrNot Founder and Executive VP, added: “Our analysis presents a unique opportunity to celebrate those places that make the air travel experience pleasurable, based on an enormous amount of data rather than just anecdotal evidence. We want to congratulate Exeter Airport for ensuring passengers are so often on cloud nine.”
Airport rankings are based on feedback data collected between November 2016 and November 2017, from airports which received over 120,000 feedbacks in the past year across more than two points of experience such as check-in, security and baggage reclaim.
Exeter Airport is part of Regional & City Airports, the airport management division of Rigby Group plc. It is enjoying its fourth successive year of growth and in the year to March handled 858,000 passengers, which is an increase of 5% on the previous year. The airport has around 40,000 aircraft movements per year.
