Philly’s airport is great, actually
Forget what the haters say. Frequent traveler Kiki Aranita argues that PHL is actually a great airport with good food, fancy lounges, and plenty of places for dogs to pee.
The Washington Post recently published a list of the best 50 U.S. airports, and PHL did not make the cut. Respectfully, Washington Post, you are wrong.
By some quirk of the data that they pulled from (they polled their readers), DCA suspiciously came in third — an airport that cannot hold an air traffic control wand to PHL.
I fly a lot. I’m one of those points-and-mileage obsessives who will fly to the other side of the country for a weekend to maintain my premier status. I grew up being shuttled between my hometowns of Honolulu and Hong Kong — treks I continue to make several times a year, now with Philly in the mix.
I guarantee you that I have spent more time at PHL than you have — not only as a traveler but while I was in grad school, I worked there as a bartender. And as such, I am here to whole-heartedly endorse the Philadelphia International Airport.
And not just by default - though I can tell you everything I hate about airports that are bigger than PHL. Newark has the dumbest organization of any airport (its terminals are organized like the tines of a fork, and you have to go through security to get to each tine – which means if you’re flying to Europe or the Middle East in the late evening, and you want to take advantage of your lounge access in a different terminal, you are out of luck).
JFK is an absolute nightmare to get to whether you’re approaching by public transit or driving, DCA looks like the bowels of a forgotten office building from the 1950s, and Dulles is deceptively far from any actual metropolitan airport.
Yes, PHL is better by comparison. But it is also unobjectively good. Here’s why:
It’s small enough that you can walk from one end of the airport to another without getting on a stupid toy train with suspicious smelling upholstery (I’m looking at you, Newark).
Have you seen our lounge game recently? We’ve been spoiled with having a Centurion Club for years now, the Chase Sapphire Lounge is simply stunning and makes flying out of Terminal D an absolute joy (there are free facials and foosball). American Airlines just upped its game with a massive twin lounge upgrade in Terminal A spanning 25,000 square feet and featuring dishes by Randy Rucker. Yes, Delta Sky Club needs improvement, but they’re working on an upgrade.
Outside of lounges, it really is becoming a hub for good dining. Oyster House just opened a PHL outpost, as did an outpost of Federal Donuts next to it. A Middle Child is on the horizon, and post-security dining keeps looking more and more like Center City in terms of dining.
Have you ever tried to walk a chihuahua inside the San Francisco airport and gagged from the stench of the pet relief room? No? How about Denver, where you’ve run around in circles clutching your chihuahua’s nether regions while praying? PHL is a veritable haven for taking your puppy to do their business. There are outdoor pee parks, indoor ones (ok, these don’t smell great), but the finest of them all is the patch of fake grass with the fake red fire hydrant at Terminal A. This is a pet owner’s dream. Inside the terminal, equipped with pet waste bags most of the time (but who needs them – no pet owner gets on a plane without a roll of poop bags), open air(ish) so it doesn’t have the stench of those dreadful pee rooms in other airports, with some sort of flushing, sprinkling contraption. My chihuahua loves peeing on that hydrant.
PHL is the city’s best and most diverse art gallery. PHL has a robust art program. Look around as you pass from Terminal B into A and notice the walls covered in fiber art from Lace in the Moon. Mural Arts has a rotating presence in the airport. And the art program has repeatedly reached out to artists and collectors of really cool objects (they’ve had recent displays from florists and a typewriter collector). It’s a dynamic, exciting program. (Full disclosure, they reached out to me long before I started at the Inquirer, when Craig LaBan covered my pandemic art project of crocheting food objects, and it went on display in Terminal B.)
PHL has really good coffee options – not just La Colombe but scrappy local roastery Elixr.
I love getting to know the ebbs and flows of the people who pass through PHL. Part of travel is being in the right frame of mind. And if you accept PHL’s quirks and get to know its finer points, I think you’ll love it, too.