Toronto Pearson Airport scores embarrassingly low for overall customer satisfaction

A new North American airport study has shown that Toronto's Pearson Airport remains pretty crappy for customer satisfaction, for the most part.

The new study from J.D. Power found that for mega airports, based on a 1,000-point scale, Pearson ranked 17th out of 21, with just 755 points.

In general, J.D. Power's report found that overall customer satisfaction with North American airports fell 25 points to a 777 score average. Pearson, clearly falls below this average.

The top airport is Minneapolis-Saint Paul International with a score of 800 points. 

But, the people at Pearson have their own thoughts to share and provided, what they've called, "important context."

"The biggest point of context is the sample size of the survey that is used to put together the rankings. JD Power surveyed just 637 Toronto Pearson passengers for the survey. When compared to the millions of passengers that have travelled through our doors, that equals 0.003% of all passengers."

Things at Toronto's Pearson Airport are actually getting better and people are noticing https://t.co/ytmFDZtclh #Toronto #TorontoPearsonAirport

— blogTO (@blogTO) August 30, 2022

Basically, Pearson says this sample size would be the same as interviewing 25 out of every one million passengers.

"And as the survey is mostly focused on American airports, only 2.4% of their entire survey list passed through Pearson. We believe this sample size is too small to draw any relevant conclusions," the airport said.

They point to their ranking from the Airport Council International World's Airport Service Quality program, which named Pearson as the "Best Large Airport in North America serving more than 40 million passengers," for a fifth consecutive year.

Pearson makes the case the this ranking is more relevant because the program is the "world's only airport customer service benchmarking program that surveys passengers in the airport on the day they travel, while the experience is fresh in their minds."

Here's what the Toronto's Pearson airport is doing to end huge delays and lineups https://t.co/WcfN6SFpub #Toronto #PearsonAirport

— blogTO (@blogTO) August 5, 2022

To further counter J.D. Power, Pearson also pointed blogTO to the Flight Aware data, which found Pearson dropped from 5th place to 19th in the world for departure delays for the week of Sept. 5-11.

"That is a significant improvement that proves we're moving in the right direction, which is back to the level of service our passengers deserve. When comparing both arrival and departures, Pearson is at 15th," they said.

Is the tide turning for Pearson? Depending on which study you look at, it appears the answer can be yes or no.