Inside Britain’s worst airport: The violence, queues and fury at travel hub where desperate passengers are forced to crawl through baggage conveyor to hunt their luggage

Prior to the pandemic, Manchester Airport was named the best airport in the UK six times on the trot in a prestigious industry awards ceremony.

Last week, it was awarded a far more dubious accolade: it’s now considered among Britain’s worst – with two of its three terminals named the country’s least pleasant.

Terminal 1 and Terminal 3 finished bottom of the table in Which? magazine’s recent survey of almost 6,000 flyers conducted over 12 months.

Terminal 2 finished fourth from the bottom, surpassing only London Luton and its sister buildings. 

It’s a remarkable fall from grace that airport bosses are refusing to recognise year on year, even as travellers bemoan its lack of facilities and dismal delays.

The Manchester Airports Group – which also operates London Stansted and East Midlands Airports – has defended the sprawling 1,400-acre facility, the busiest in Britain outside of the capital.

It claims the surveys are not representative of the daily experiences of the 23million passengers who use it every single year.

The Which? appraisal covered 11 categories, ranging from the rate of late cancellations to customer service, queues for check-in, bag drop and security and the availability of seats, food and drink and toilets.

Manchester’s Terminal 3 – home to its Ryanair flights – received an approval score of 43 per cent; Terminal 1, 47 per cent; and Terminal 2, which was expanded and renovated a few years ago, 53 per cent. 

The airport’s one saving grace may be that just over one per cent of flights were cancelled with little notice – within 24 hours of intended departure time – between May 2024 and April 2025 according to the Civil Aviation Authority.

This was much lower than other better-ranking airports such as London City, Southampton, Belfast City, Glasgow and London Heathrow.

But passengers say Manchester’s poor customer service, yawning queues for security and a dearth of food and drink – with what is available deemed overpriced – could not offset even minimal problems with the flights themselves.

‘We tried to use Manchester Airport assistance last year for our holiday,’ Rhiannon Cooper, a personal trainer from Wolverhampton, told the Mail.

‘We booked in advance but left stranded without a wheelchair to make our own way through. I was in hysterics walking to the gate mid-panic attack. It was dire. 

‘We flew from Birmingham this year and it was so, so, so different. We agreed from now on we would pay more just to go from Birmingham. We are roughly the same distance from both.’

A passenger quoted in the Which? survey claimed it was ‘impossible to get a drink or something to eat, but much worse than that – there is nowhere to sit.’

The airport is also among those to impose drop-off charges, which are £5 for five minutes or £6.40 for 10. Per minute, 

But the ‘borderless’ system, which requires motorists to pay online after visiting instead of paying at a barrier, has proven deeply unpopular. 

Driver Eric Moffatt, 66, dropped his daughter and granddaughter off for a flight to Dubai before rushing inside to find a bathroom as he suffers from an ongoing bladder problem. 

He was fined £25 by the airport for taking 18 seconds too long to leave the area, despite his pleas for leniency. A member of staff told him he could appeal – but that the fine would be hiked to £60 if he lost.

Three years ago, the airport’s managing director Karen Smart quit as it appeared to struggle with the post-Covid recovery of the air travel industry.

Huge queues formed and flights were cancelled in the spring of 2022 due to a reported lack of staff, with passengers seen vaulting barriers and abandoning luggage in desperate attempts to make their flights.

an undercover investigation by Channel 4 found that passengers were regularly growing so frustrated at delays to their aggage being delivered on landing that they had taken to crawling on the conveyor belts to get air-side.

The issues appeared to largely concern baggage handling firm Swissport, which had slashed staff counts by half. It later insisted the issues were not solely down to its ground handlers – or the lack of them.

A year ago, the airport was beset with huge delays after a major power cut. A quarter of all flights were cancelled.

The electrical interruption lasted just a few minutes at around 1.30am on June 23 2024 – but that was enough to knock out security systems for baggage, boarding passes and passport control, which took hours to restore to full capacity.

Flights were left circling in the skies above the airport and some were then diverted elsewhere. 

Airport bosses blamed a faulty cable on site, and a subsequent surge of electricity as supply was restored, for the issues. A backup generator had kicked in, but the situation was complicated by power cutting out multiple times.

Another power cut then hit Terminal 3 earlier this year, knocking the lights out and disabling computer terminals at border control, as reported by the Manchester Evening News.

Not every delay is necessarily down to the airport: a recent collision between two easyJet planes on the taxiway is still under investigation.

The two orange jets clipped wings at 6.30am on August 15, depriving them of vital wing tips and delaying other flights. easyJet said it was investigating how the two planes came into contact, and was contacted for further comment.

And last year the airport was at the centre of a policing scandal after police officers were seen kicking a man in the head as he lay prone on the floor of the car park at Terminal 2.

It later emerged that the man, Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, had assaulted a member of the public at a Starbucks in the airport beforehand – and lashed out at officers, breaking the nose of PC Lydia Ward.

Amaaz and his brother Muhammad Amaad will face a retrial on assaulting PC Zachary Marsden next year. 

Charges against PC Marsden were not pursued after he was seen to kick Amaaz in the head but he may yet face a probe from policing regulator the IOPC. 

Another officer who leaked footage of the altercation to the press may also face disciplinary action.

Airport bosses have insisted the Which? report ‘bears no resemblance to the experience people receive at Manchester Airport day in, day out’.

It claims the ‘outdated and unrepresentative’ consumer survey – which polled some 6,000 people over the last 12 months – doesn’t take into account the fact that larger airports are busier. 

Chris Woodroofe, its managing director, attacked Which? over what he called its ‘continued pursuit of headlines’.

It’s not the first time it has hit out at the survey, calling last year’s results ‘oversimplified judgements’ that were ‘limited and out of date’. 

He was backed by spokespersons for Heathrow, which attacked the magazine’s survey of 6,000 people as ‘unrepresentatively small’, and Luton, which said it was ‘simply not representative’ of travellers’ views.

‘I am proud that Manchester Airport is serving more passengers than ever before, connecting 31m people a year to more than 200 destinations – dozens of which you cannot fly to from anywhere else outside London,’ he said.

‘Through our historic £1.3bn transformation programme, we have created a world-class and award-winning Terminal 2. We have also announced plans to invest significantly in Terminal 3 – starting this year.

‘I am also proud to say customer satisfaction has increased significantly over the past four years. 

‘We know how customers feel about their experience because we asked hundreds of them every week about it. 

‘Between January and June this year, 91% of 3,045 people surveyed told us their experience was good, very good or excellent.

‘That is how I know this latest outdated and unrepresentative report from Which? bears no resemblance to the experience people receive at Manchester Airport day in, day out.’