Major publication claims Aspen airport is ‘most stressful’, but data is unreliable

The popular travel magazine Travel + Leisure published an article Monday claiming the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport is the most stressful in the U.S. 

Their claim was based on flight delays, cancellations, and Google reviews that were bundled together with different weights to produce a list of the most stressful airports based on which airports had the worst combination of those factors. The source, however, was a randomizer website where users can “spin the wheel” to produce random outcomes called spinthewheelgenerator.com.

The website has no data, blog posts, or reports about anything related to airport data or air travel-related stress factors. 

The data cited by Travel + Leisure is also in direct conflict with data pulled from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which is the U.S. government’s data tracking arm of the Department of Transportation and keeps detailed statistics on air travel that includes delays and cancellations for small airports. 

Travel + Leisure, who, according to their website, reach an average of 16 million people monthly, claimed through their article that the average delay time at ASE is 45 minutes, and that 9% of flights are cancelled. The BTS states that, for 2024, numbers are closer to a 26 minute average delay time and 6.5% flight cancellation rates. 

Bill Tomcich, managing partner at Air Planners Inc. and consultant with Fly Aspen Snowmass, pulled the data from the BTS himself in a variety of ways and confirmed he could not produce the same result that Travel + Leisure appeared to arrive at. 

“No matter how I slice this data, if calculated on an annual basis, I am showing considerably lower cancellation rates, and considerably shorter average delays than what any of these articles suggest,” Tomcich said. “If you average these two reports with 4.26% of inbound cancellation rate with a 6.52% outbound cancellation, that gives you an overall roundtrip cancellation rate of 5.39% for 2024.”

The Aspen Times reached out to the reporter of the Travel + Leisure article that shared the claim that ASE is the most stressful airport, and was pointed in the direction of a press release shared by a UK-based PR firm Search Intelligence Ltd. The individual at Search Intelligence who shared the press release could not be reached for comment on the source of the data, and Search Intelligence did not respond to requests for more information on where the data came from. 

The data source attributed in Search Intelligence’s press release in late August was also spinthewheelgenerator.com, and did not have any more details on the “report” that they claimed produced this data. 

The press release appears to have also been cited by Men’s Journal in a similar article crowning ASE the “most stressful” airport in an article in August. A number of other publications also appear to have reported on the data. 

A New York Post article that was published a week ago also named ASE the most stressful airport due to seemingly incorrect 45 minute average delay times and 9% flight cancellations, the same data that Travel + Leisure shared. However, this article attributed that data to Mood.com, an online CBD-retailer. 

The Palm Beach Post, a newspaper in Florida, published an article in May of this year using the same data, focusing on Florida airports that were named in the “Top 10 most stressful airports.” ASE was highlighted as the most stressful airport here as well, but the source for the Palm Beach Post’s data was Brown’s CBD, a CBD retailer based out of the United Kingdom. 

Neither Mood.com, nor Brown’s CBD, appear to have a report anywhere on their website corroborating the data cited by those articles.

Despite questions about data reliability, these articles tend to highlight smaller, regional airports as more stressful. According to statements in those articles, regional airports don’t have the capacity to be able to absorb the impacts of delays and cancellations that larger airports have. 

But Diane Jackson, the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport director, questioned the veracity of quantifying stress solely based on the metrics used in the Travel + Leisure article, and others. 

“It’s definitely a percentage of it, but that is definitely not the full story,” Jackson said, referring to delays and cancellations’ overall role in air travel stress.  “I think that there are so many other aspects that play into people having a stressful experience.”

Jackson pointed to other factors playing a large role in airport stress like parking availability, ticket counter lines, and security lines, none of which were taken into consideration in the 2025 airport stress articles from Travel + Leisure and other publications. 

The peculiarities of the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport, like the high-altitude and the high winter traffic, do make ASE likely to appear higher on the stress list.

“Of course ASE is going to have higher cancellations and delays than most airports,” Tomcich said. “It is the closest commercial airport to a ski resort with service by multiple airlines, it’s the third highest-elevation commercial air service airport in North America, ASE receives more snow than any airport in the world with this volume of air traffic, and ASE is the only one-way in, one-way out airport in the U.S. and therefore has half the capacity of any other single-runway airport.” 

According to Jackson, though, many of those factors are focus areas for the upcoming remodel of the airport. She points to ZGF Architects, who have been contracted for the project, and their recent track record of airport modernization — ZGF was involved in the recently completed Portland Airport remodel, which has received a 2025 Design Award from FastCompany.com.