Port Harcourt International Airport was named the world's worst airport in a November 2015 survey by the travel website sleepinginairports.net, based on feedback gathered from thousands of travellers on criteria including terminal facilities, cleanliness, comfort and staff conduct.
The survey's findings described unhelpful staff, requests for bribes, a shortage of seating, malfunctioning air-conditioning and a tented structure serving as the arrivals hall at the airport, which serves Nigeria's oil-producing Rivers State. The same report ranked Abuja's Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport and Lagos's Murtala Muhammed International Airport as the seventh and tenth worst airports in Africa respectively.
FAAN Pushes Back
The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) disputed the ranking, with a spokesperson for the agency calling the survey's basis unfounded and pointing out that Port Harcourt's domestic terminal was already undergoing renovation at the time, alongside construction of a new international terminal. FAAN made similar points about Lagos and Abuja, noting that Murtala Muhammed International Airport had also been undergoing renovation work and that a Chinese-built terminal was under construction at the Nnamdi Azikiwe airport in Abuja.
A Recurring Complaint
Even so, the ranking reflected a longstanding pattern of traveller complaints about Nigerian airport infrastructure that predates and outlasts individual renovation projects, and it arrived in the same year the federal government unveiled its broader Aviation Road Map, which set out plans to concession the country's four largest airport terminals to private operators as a route to sustained infrastructure investment.