Jakarta Airport [CGK]

What CGK actually received

Three separate things were announced together, which is part of why the coverage blurred them.

One wording detail matters. ACI’s own category is “Best Airport at Departures: Over 40 Million Passengers”. Most Indonesian reports, including Antara’s, shortened it to “Best Airport over 40 Million Passengers”. The dropped words are the scope: this is the departures journey being rated, not the airport as a whole. ACI runs a separate arrivals category, which awarded only six airports worldwide in this round; CGK is not one of them.

What ASQ measures, and what it does not

The Airport Service Quality programme is ACI’s passenger survey. Questionnaires are given to departing and arriving travellers inside the terminal, on the day they fly, using a standardised form administered the same way at airports around the world, across all operating hours and months. ACI says nearly 707,000 passengers were surveyed for the 2025 round, that airports must hit minimum quarterly sample sizes and pass quality audits on more than 50 metrics to qualify for an award, and that 100 airports shared 195 awards across all categories and regions.

That is a meaningfully better instrument than the reader-poll awards airports also collect. Nobody self-nominates their way to a good score, and the sample is the actual travelling public rather than people who chose to vote online. When we say this site is sceptical of airport awards, ASQ is the one we are least sceptical of.

Two limits are worth holding on to.

• “Best” means a band, not a rank. ACI recognises the top 20 percent of airports in the departures and arrivals categories, and the top 5 percent by region for the category awards such as cleanliness. Its published 2025 winner list names nine Asia-Pacific airports over 40 million passengers — Beijing Daxing, Mumbai, Delhi, Guangzhou Baiyun, Incheon, Shanghai Pudong, Shenzhen Bao’an, Singapore Changi and Soekarno-Hatta. No order is published within that group.
• It scores the terminal, not the timetable. The questionnaire covers check-in, security, cleanliness, staff, wayfinding, food and comfort. It does not measure on-time performance, cancellation rates, or how long it took you to reach the airport. An airport can rate well on ASQ in a year when its flights ran badly, and the two are not in conflict — they are measuring different things.

ACI World director general Justin Erbacci framed the 2025 results as airports “demonstrating that passenger satisfaction can continue to rise despite growing pressure”.

Who announced what, and when

This is not a result that landed this week. The survey ran through 2025, the winners were published in February 2026, and the trophies were handed over at the start of September. What was announced in Tangerang on 19 September was an airport statement about all of it.

The source of the Indonesian coverage is a written statement from Heru Karyadi, general manager of Soekarno-Hatta, not an independent assessment published this month. “The transformation we are carrying out at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport continues to have a positive impact on the passenger experience,” he said, describing the change as one that has “now transformed into a culture”. InJourney Airports chief executive Mohammad R. Pahlevi has framed the wider programme as making airports “the face and pride of Indonesia”. Both are statements of intent from the organisation being praised. The underlying ASQ data is not; it is worth keeping the two apart.

Level 4 is not a passenger verdict

The third item is the one most likely to be misread. Customer Experience Accreditation is a voluntary five-level programme that airports apply and pay to join. ACI assesses how the operator runs customer experience as a management discipline — strategy, customer insight, governance, performance measurement, continuous improvement, and how widely that work is shared across the airport community. ACI describes Level 4 as an airport that “has established a customer experience culture”, where all employees contribute to shaping the passenger journey.

InJourney Airports said on 18 September 2026 that four of its airports had reached Level 4: Soekarno-Hatta, I Gusti Ngurah Rai in Bali, Jenderal Ahmad Yani in Semarang and Sultan Aji Muhammad Sulaiman Sepinggan in Balikpapan. That is a statement about how the operator is organised. It is a reasonable thing for an airport to be proud of. It does not tell you how long the immigration queue will be on a Friday evening.

Set against what 2026 has actually looked like

The survey window closed before the year this site has spent covering. For readers who have followed CGK through 2026, the contrast is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as a nagging feeling.

• A two-day closure. Anak Krakatau’s eruption shut Soekarno-Hatta and seven other airports; CGK reopened just after midnight on Tuesday 8 September 2026. Counts differ — the Transport Ministry put the disruption at 2,961 flights and about 341,000 passengers across the eight airports, InJourney Airports at 4,174 flights and 455,754 passengers across its own network. Soekarno-Hatta alone accounted for more than 900 disrupted flights.
• Haze cancellations. Kalimantan smoke forced cancellations on 13 and 14 September 2026, with the airport activating its service recovery procedure in the terminals. Our guide to why CGK flights still get cancelled tracks the three unrelated causes running at once.
• Fires on the doorstep. Two large fires near the airport on 16 September 2026 did not affect flights, but they did put smoke across the approach roads.
• Volume. CGK handled 13.48 million passengers in the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than the next three Indonesian airports combined. Nothing about a cleanliness award changes the fact that this is a very large, very busy airport.

None of that contradicts the ASQ result. Volcanic ash, forest fires and warehouse fires are not what a terminal survey scores, and most of them are outside an airport operator’s control. But they are what actually ruins trips, and an award that does not measure them should not be read as a promise about them.

What is genuinely better

Stripping out the press-release language, a few things have changed at CGK that a traveller can actually see.

• Terminal 1C. The rebuilt terminal went into full operation on 12 November 2025, with Citilink consolidating its Soekarno-Hatta flights there. Kompas reported its capacity rising from 3 million to 10 million passengers a year, taking the airport’s total to about 96 million. The photograph at the top of this article is its arrivals hall in April 2026. If you last flew from Terminal 1 some years ago, it is a different building.
• Cleanliness, on the passengers’ own account. This is the one result that is both new and directly about what you will notice. CGK was not on the previous round’s Asia-Pacific cleanest list; it is on this one. That is a change in what passengers reported, not in what the airport says about itself.
• The departures journey holds up. Keeping a top-band departures score two rounds running, at an airport handling more than 40 million passengers a year through three terminals, is not nothing.

And the honest weak points: schedule reliability in 2026 has been poor for reasons mostly beyond the airport, ground transport to the airport still needs generous timing — see our transport guide — and the operator’s own public website can be slow or unreachable from outside Indonesia, which is a large part of why this site exists.

So is CGK a good airport to fly through?

For the part the survey covers, yes. On the evidence of passengers who were actually there, the departures experience at Soekarno-Hatta rates with the better large airports in the region, and the terminals are now rated clean by the people using them. If your worry is grim facilities and a miserable three hours before boarding, that worry is out of date.

For the part it does not cover, be more careful. Plan as you would at any very large airport in a country with active volcanoes and a haze season: arrive early, keep connections loose, check your flight before you leave for the airport, and read the weather at the other end of your route as well as in Jakarta. Our delays and cancellations guide sets out what you are owed when it goes wrong.

What is not known

ACI does not publish the scores behind the awards, so there is no way to see how close CGK was to the edge of the band, how it moved year on year, or how it compares with Changi and Incheon within the same group. Neither the airport nor ACI has published a CGK-specific sample size. The fee airports pay for accreditation is not public. And the 2026 disruption will not show up in an ASQ result until the next round, which on this year’s timetable would be announced in early 2027.