Like expensive watches that never break, the world’s best airports can be boring. You land, move through passport control and check into a hotel within minutes. The experience is pleasant, but not memorable. The worst airports have more characters. To adapt Tolstoy, lovely airports are all alike, but every wretched airport is wretched in its own way.

To work out which is the world’s worst airport, we conducted a survey of our correspondents who travelled a lot. It attracted more, and more passionate, responses than nearly any other internal survey we have done.

Although each awful airport is unique, four themes occur again and again: danger, bullying by officials, theft and delay. Sometimes, all these enhance each other. For example, it takes ages to get through Lubumbashi airport (in the Democratic Republic of Congo) because security officials slow things down in the hope that passengers will give them “un Cadeau” to hurry up. If you hand over $1, they let you board without your bags getting checked at all. Such deals make air travel in places like Congo slower, riskier, costlier and much more unpleasant.

Air travellers make tempting targets for thieves. They are rich enough to afford an air ticket, which in many places makes them rich indeed. They carry luggage, some of it valuable. They are often far from home and unfamiliar with local rules. And airports are full of choke points through which travellers must pass if they are to board their planes, creating opportunities for dishonest officials to charge them. The ones in Manila are especially creative. Some have been known to plant bullets in luggage so they can “find” them and demand money not to have the owners arrested.

Rules change at borders, and some airport officials enforce them mindlessly. One correspondent recalls that in Santiago, Chile: “I once got detained for two hours for failing to declare an unopened, sealed bag of almonds. I then had to write a declaration expressing my regret for bringing the nuts. When I failed to do so without cracking up I was threatened with arrest. The lady next to me was being interrogated for carrying a lone banana.”

Poor countries have an excuse for poor airports. Rich countries do not, which is perhaps why travellers are particularly annoyed to find grottiness (恶心) in, say, Brussels, the heart of the European Union. Our Charlemagne columnist writes of Charleroi, its second airport: “It is dirty and crowded, and has terrible food. The planes leave and land at unreasonble hours. And the only real way into town is a coach that runs every 30 minutes and is frequently overbooked: more than once I’ve queued in the rain only to see it drive off as I reach the front.”

The world’s top car makers are increasingly offering more electric car models as they back away from gasoline engines. This growth is expected to continue, with more people choosing to hit the road with clean-running electric-powered cars.

Environmentalists have praised the car makers for taking major steps to limit harmful pollutants linked to worldwide climate change. But electric cars are also known for another big characteristic. They run on electricity instead of gas, and can operate in silence.

While many people might consider this a good thing, the main peril is that people walking in areas around electric cars cannot hear the cars coming, and therefore are very likely to be hit.

Governments in the United States and Europe have recognized this. So they have set requirements for car makers to add warning sounds to cars operating on electricity. The US Department of Transportation finalized its rules a year ago, which require electric cars to be equipped with some kind of warning sound when moving at speeds up to 30 kilometers each hour.

Representatives from some major car makers spoke about the issue ahead of the Geneva International Motor Show in Switzerland. Frank Welsch is the head of technical development at Germany’s Volkswagen. He told Reuters, “The electric car sound is its identity. It cannot be too noisy or disturbing. It has to be futuristic and cannot sound like anything we had in the past.”

Of course, one of the easiest solutions will be for car makers to simply reproduce the sound a car will make if it actually runs on gas. But many industry officials believe this will be a mistake. They say this will not support the electric car’s true identity. It would also limit great possibilities to link the car’s sound to a whole new image, which could help increase sales. They are now trying any sound that can represent the electric cars.

Limited to a narrow seat for hours with just a tiny bag of cookies and orange juice to comfort yourself, the last thing you feel like doing when you get off a plane is to wait around for your bags. The easy choice when traveling has been to limit yourself to a carry-on suitcase and pray it fits in the overhead bin. Not only does it get you out of the airport faster but it’s also free. Not any longer, however.

Recently, some airlines are starting to charge for carry-on bags, and travelers aren’t at all happy about it. Packing light might not be a choice anymore when looking for tips to get the best airfare possible.

Some smaller airlines such as Frontier and Spirit have always charged customers for carry-on bags, but now bigger name airlines, such as United, are starting to do it too. When you buy a Basic Economy ticket through United，you’re not allowed a full-size carry-on bag unless you’re a Mileageplus Premier member. If you forget to check your bag before security and bring it all the way to the gate, not only will you pay the checked-bag fee, but you’ll have to pay an additional $ 25 gate handling charge. Not the best way to start off a trip. Don’t miss these additional things airlines don’t want to tell you but every flier should be aware of.

You might think that the new carry-on bag guidelines are due to space limitations in the overhead bins, but it has more to do with on-time rates（准时率）. Aviation economies experts and seniors vice president of ICF Aviation Samuel Engel told Vox that the biggest bottleneck when it comes to boarding is carry-on luggage. For every minute a plane isn’t in the air, it’s losing money. A delayed flight makes the crew(乘务人员) look bad and passengers very angry So, the next time you fly, plan to check your bag before security, pay a bit more for your ticket so you are allowed a carry-on, or try rolling a week’s worth of clothes into a backpack, a still-allowed “personal item”.