Doesn't surprise me at all, though the last time I commented here about the suckiness of Chicago airports ten Chicago fanboys jumped on me. Considering I used to live in western Michigan and flew about 90% of my flights through O'Hare or Midway - trust me, they SUCK. The best time was when my flight got cancelled for no apparent reason and United refused to rebook me. That was a nice long time spent in the hellhole called O'Hare.

To be somewhat fair, they did have some nasty weather in Chicago in December. That probably pushed their percentages even lower than usual.

I love that walkway between terminals at O'Hare. Diddy did it!

I flew out of Midway twice last year, both time my flight back to Minneapolis (a 50 or so minute flight) was delayed by at least the length of the flight. Good times.
But, I still believe that the worst parting was taking the CTA Orange line to and from the airport.... With the slow zones it took longer to get from Midway to downtown Chicago then my flight from Minneapolis to Chicago...

I have had numerous issues with O'Hare airport that it's sickening. The worst was when I won a trip to Australia, and I didn't even go because not only was my layover flight canceled, but all of my luggage was gone, never to be found by the fuckers. Also, almost half of my business trips went through O'Hare, and always had issues with delays and cancellations.

I never had a say on flights through the company I used to work for, because it was always picked out for me by the company secretary. Bitch probably hated me. =P

at least O'Hare isn't a shithole like Oakland's airport

We had some crappy-ass weather in December, snow storms every other day and subzero temps....might have contributted to the worse-than-normal performance of ohare.

Agreed....not that i'm sticking up for O'Hare, and United specifically is terrible...but we did have unusually bad weather even for Chicago. I still would take Midway over Ohare any day of the week...they have a Potbelly's and a Nuts on Clark...the delays are more tolerable with a bag of caramel/cheddar popcorn...

@Mike Dunn: I have flown out of O'hare several times in the past few years, all in summer and never once did I get out on time. In one instance my plane was delayed THREE HOURS.

How is McCarran (Vegas)? I'm flying there in July and just about everywhere I read claims its a total nightmare.

Traveling through O'Hare is like being a participant in the movie "Airplane" - especially when it comes to gates moving constantly. It's like a grown-up version of hide and seek. A couple of years ago, a flight to Sioux Falls moved so fast and frequently that by the time we got to the moved gate, it had been moved again. Good times.

PHL must not have been open on the day of the survey.

@philmin: It's been bad the 2 times I'm been through there. I think it has to do more with the kind and mindset of the travelers there. They're still on vacation as they board the plane to go home.

Unless you like listening to slot machines, bring some earplugs.

What do you expect at one of the world's busiest airports and biggest connecting-flight hub located in a snow belt?

O'Hare is notorious for weather delays -- their traffic controllers impose 90 minute delays the instant anything resembling precipitation falls from the sky. Midway, on the other hand, does no such thing...they're usually on-time during most mild weather (whereas O'Hare shuts down).

I've been to Midway many times. It's not that bad. What's bad is trying to figure out the bizarro freeway system Chicago has. Better off cabbing around Chicago.

I love living in Chicago. I also love leaving Chicago in my car, not by airplane!

Foul weather. There ya have it folks! Should they fly on time and not bother to de-ice the aircraft? Meg should have mentioned this in her article synopsis.

@philmin: I actually kind of like McCarran. Free wi-fi at the terminals anyway. There are problems just because it's so busy, but crowds don't actually seem to stagnate in one place. It's like a giant moving crowd. They usually have plenty of security checkpoints open so the lines move fast even though they're long. Certain hotels have desks at the baggage area so you can check in right there and avoid the line at the hotel. The taxi line can be very long, but again it moves fast. The secret is to arrive and depart on days that aren't big hotel package arrival/departure days (Thursday for inbound, Sunday for outbound).

@nicemarmot617: Yep, used to fly from Flint, MI to Midway for connecting flights all the time. Flint was pretty good - but Midway was just awful. No experience with O'Hare, though.

Man my last flight was delayed nearly 2 hours, but it wasn't ohares fault it was uniteds. Apparently their was a "small gap" on the sensor on the back of the plane they ended up taping it up with a tape that's a 100 times stronger than duct tape. I seriously did NOT want to hear that the plane I'm on is taped together as my plane is just about to take off. My flight back was even better we got back nearly 30 minutes early and we sat on the runway for a hour and a half because our gate was not open and they were trying to redirect us to another gate. I guess that one was ohares issue.

@FrankenPC: Yeah if you're a millionaire!

@nicemarmot617: I'm a born and bred Chicagoan. Love the city, love the sports teams, love almost everything about it. The airports, however, are the travel equivalent of flaring herpes. Anyone who defends O'Hare as anything other than the shittiest airport in American is a moron, Chicagoan or not

@flyingphotog: Bingo!

I don't have anything to back this up, but I recall hearing a stat on the news that was basically "Chicago had received as much snow in this winter, through December, as Chicago received the entire winter last year". And last year was a bad winter. We've had a LOT of snow.

But for the record, Midway is infinitely better than O'Hare.

Man, I miss the days in the late when you could just go to O'hare anytime of the day or night, park, and just walk for miles through the terminals, looking at the hardware. Nobody said "Boo" to you (but the foodstuffs were still gouge-tastic).

@nicemarmot617: REAL Chicagoans see this as a badge of pride. Like the rampant corruption, terrible roads, astronomical sales tax, and our lovable losers the Cubs. And the Bears, too.

The weather was extremely bad. Which makes this post pointless.

I've flown from Midway to Kansas City on Southwest a few times and it was always a breeze. Even when I had to check 3 bags.

Of course nothing beats the speed and free wifi of the Kansas City airport.

@xAnarChisTx: Should have bought her flowers and a paper weight for administrative assistant's day.

Seriously, I never got the smaller companies letting an administrative assistant booking travel especially after this internet thing happened and flights were accessible online. One company I worked for had a dedicated agency for the division it was in yet the company still had the company admin person get flights/hotels.

Several years in a row much fun resulted when the company president would forget until the last minute to tell her to book hotel rooms for the biggest yearly trade convention. The rooms end up about 25 miles outside of the city and about 30 miles away from the convention location. This vexed the sales guys to no end as they couldn't drink and smooze their customers at the "big"$$$ hotel where all the customer's were staying.

Finally one sales guy took it over and put the company big wigs and sales in the "big"$$$ hotel and several of the support staff at a lesser but more local hotel. Which suited us fine since we then didn't have to carry drunk sales guys back to their rooms and we could drink, party, etc with vitual impunity from management. Downside was that the sales guy got all the frequent flyer miles and such...

It is for some reason my favorite airport after Hawaii, I really do not care if its considered to be the worst...

@dinger_82: That is really the only good thing about O'hare.

@philmin: The bad thing about McCarran is the @#*&ing tram. It makes you think you're almost to your gate, and then you find out oh, no, you get to wait in a line to get on a stupid tram to take you to the other terminal. It's ridiculous and when the airport is crowded the wait can add a lot of time. I must say though, I was there last holiday weekend and it wasn't that crowded, so it probably won't be too bad.

The airport security videos they play while you wait in line are mildly amusing too.

@Mr_D: I avoid Chicago airports if possible. Midway is better than O'Hare but like the article says, not by much. Weather does play a huge part in this. Lake Michigan makes it worse. I used to live in Hyde Park and love Chicago but the airports are a mess.

@philmin: It's not bad, but it could be a heckuva lot worse. They know how to move crowds through the place and the baggage claim/ground transportation is very quick, considering how much traffic it gets.

@Steeb2er: You're correct, that was a soundbyte from Tom Skilling, ont eh WGN news. As of December 17th, we were already in our 7th snowiest December in 124 years of recordkeeping (see Skilling's blog: [blogs.trb.com])

This is not to say that O'Hare is in any fashion good even in the best of weather. But the fact that it has gotten this bad can be at least partially blamed on the weather.

It doesn't help that so many major hubs are located in places known for crappy winter weather:
Chicago, Salt Lake City, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Newark. 2 Former hubs also come to mind: Pittsburgh (U.S. Air) and St. Louis (TWA).

As much as I dislike Delta, I flew them in December just so I could fly through Atlanta and reduce the risks of a weather-related delay. I have zero regrets there.

This is surprising. Maybe it's because I mainly fly SWA and they tend to get their passengers off and on quickly and get to the runway @ Midway. I flew JetBlue this weekend and we were in and out of O'Hare quickly on a Thursday and Sunday evening.

@philmin:

I've been through it a few times... it's not great but nothing that stands out as worse than other airports. Don't play the slots, they have the worst odds in Vegas because bored airplane travelers have nothing better to do than sink quarters into them... its not like they have competition behind the security checkpoints.

That headline and Consumerist's article are incredibly misleading. Delays are only one of many criteria which may determine how good or bad an airport is. In fact, the article Consumerist cites to says, "Delays at city's airports worst in nation." The article in no way implies that Chicago's airports are the "worst" in anything but that.

The Chicago airports exist primarily to provide patronage jobs. Any actual air travel services provided are accidental, and Richard M. Daley (whose name is plastered on every vertical surface) apologizes for the convenience.

@Patrick Mcgranaghan: Yeah, but you know, since the flights leave on time, you don't have to spend much more time in the shithole than you planned. Plus, OAK got some lightning fast security.

@MrsLopsided: Thing is, the stats would suggest there's more to it than that--the mere fact that Midway, which isn't much of a hub, scored worse than Detroit and Minneapolis (which was fourth best) is telling; Miami and Dallas are both clunking along at the bottom too, and they're not exactly snow belt.

It is a little confusing, though, since different sources are reporting different airports in the same places. I'm looking through the BTS to see if I can find the source document.

@mikedunn: Oh, God, I will HAPPILY take the extra 3% delays at O'Hare for the opportunity to get the airport and back without someone TRYING TO MUG ME IN MY FREAKING CAR. Midway is awful.

That said, and KNOCK ON FREAKING WOOD, I can't believe I'm about to tempt Murphy this way -- I've never actually been delayed more than a couple minutes out of O'Hare.

(Also, O'Hare has that Wolfgang Puck's breakfast place, which is like my favorite airport breakfast EVER.)

@FrankenPC: But freeways are so much cuter when they have personal names! And when "west" means "north" it keeps the rubes out!

@Steeb2er: It has definitely been a crazy weather year. I'm down in Peoria (mom's in Chicago) and we've been getting the crazy too. We had a five-day weekend due to snow days. And it's 65* right now ... before Valentine's day. All my bulbs are going to get confused and come up.

@Quake 'n' Shake: Yet Salt Lake City had the best on-time rate. So something is going on beyond mere weather.

@rubinow: Yeah, but Consumerist has been playing fast and loose with headlines for a while now. What you see often isn't nearly what you get.

As an aside: I'm a Chicagoan, and as much as the huge flaws of O'Hare and Midway irritate the hell out of me, they're still better than the Bizarro-world clusterfuck of Dulles and its people-movers.

@Neecy: i hate that walk way between terminals because it means you're flying united and if there's anything worse than flying out of o'hare, it's flying united out of o'hare.

I guess I'm lucky, I live in Miami, and always travel out of MIA... and MIA was named top airport in 2008.

woot woot.

Although I travelled out of PHL a couple of years ago, and it wasn't that bad.

@Quake 'n' Shake: St. Louis is now an American hub, and hardly one at that. They've severely cut back operations in STL. And I live in STL and have flown out many times and I don't think I've ever had a flight delayed more than 30 minutes, they do a good job here.

I have to connect in O'Hare in a few weeks for a flight, both ways. Not looking forward to it.

@Patrick Mcgranaghan: Say what you want about Oakland, but at least flights leave on time there, unlike that shithole called O'Hare. Oakland does have pretty quick security, which is saying something.

I never liked going through O'Hare, especially for connecting flights from the end of Concourse G, and have to literally run a 100 meter dash to the far end of Concourse K. For those who don't know, that's 1 kilometer.