Khajuraho Airport in Madhya Pradesh has been ranked the highest in the Airports Authority of India’s latest Customer Satisfaction Index even though it has handled no commercial flights since 1 July 2026. The terminal that serves the UNESCO-listed temple town sits empty through July and August, yet the survey still placed it at the top of the national ranking for passenger experience.
The index measures cleanliness, terminal ambience, staff behaviour, ease of movement, security checks and other service qualities. It does not measure traffic volume, connectivity or commercial viability. Passengers who used the airport while the Delhi and Varanasi flights were still operating gave it near-perfect scores. Those flights have since been suspended; the airport director has said services are expected to resume in October. Until then the runway and terminal remain unused by scheduled airlines.
The result exposes a gap between how India currently rates its airports and the practical purpose of the facilities themselves. A quiet, well-kept terminal can score highly when few people pass through it. A busy hub with queues, delayed baggage and strained facilities will often score lower even though it moves far more passengers and sustains more economic activity. The CSI is useful for tracking service standards. It is not a measure of whether an airport is fulfilling its role in the national network.
Khajuraho’s situation also raises sharper questions about route planning and tourism policy. The town is a major heritage destination. Air access has always been scant, with only two routes even at its busiest. When those routes disappear for months, the airport’s high satisfaction score becomes almost academic. Travellers who want to reach the temples must use road or rail connections instead. Airlines, for their part, clearly judged the remaining demand too thin to justify the aircraft and crew. Ground service operators have already moved their staff and services to other airports.
The episode does not mean the CSI is worthless. It means the metric answers only one narrow question. How satisfied were the people who actually used the airport when flights were operating? It says nothing about whether those flights should exist, whether the capacity is matched to tourism demand, or whether public investment in the facility is producing the connectivity it was built to provide. Until airlines return and the schedule stabilises, Khajuraho will remain India’s best-rated airport with no planes which an elegant illustration of the difference between measuring service quality and measuring usefulness.
Countries that treat UNESCO temple or sacred sites as core economic assets rather than isolated monuments tend to see the strongest long-term tourism returns. Cambodia, Indonesia, Egypt and Japan stand out as the clearest parallels for a place like Khajuraho. Because they recognised the global drawing power of a major temple complex and built the surrounding tourism system around it.