At the airport, some passengers echoed the problems identified in the study.
“When you come out of baggage, it’s a dark and dingy noisy tunnel,’’ said Thomas Dougherty, 61, an energy consultant from Waukesha, Wis., who used to travel 100,000 miles a year. Still, he said, his experiences at Logan are better than they used to be.
Noah Chirico, 18, of Lexington, comes to the airport a few times a month to watch planes and agreed there’s room for improvement: “This airport’s like a zoo . . . it’s all clumped together,’’ he said.
Airport spokesman Matthew Brelis acknowledged that roadway signs can come up quickly on motorists, but he also pointed out that the airport operates on just 1,700 acres.
“No other US airport handles as many passengers on such a small footprint of land,’’ he said. Logan handled 25.5 million passengers last year.
The Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan, is planning $1 billion in improvements in the next five years that might help improve the airport’s abysmal rankings. Yesterday the board approved funding for 379 projects, including airfield improvements, security enhancements, centralizing the security checkpoint in Terminal C, renovating the Terminal B parking garage, and constructing a consolidated rental car facility.
This year’s J.D. Power ratings continued a slide for Logan. It has been slipping in the rankings since 2007, when it came in seventh among 25 midsize airports. The California-based market research firm, well known for its safety rankings of automobiles, has been doing the airport customer satisfaction surveys for nine years. (A study wasn’t conducted for 2009.)
In the past dozen years, Logan has undergone $4.5 billion worth of improvements, including a new Terminal A, an expanded Terminal E, a bigger parking garage, and a new roadway system and runway. Additionally, last year, Virgin America, Sun Country, Porter, and Southwest airlines all began service out of Logan.
