Britain's best and worst airport links survey shows wide variation in fares, journey times, and waiting times

Leaving on a jet plane? The Government wants you to travel to your airport by public transport. Last month, aviation minister Robert Goodwill said he was in favour of more airports levying “drop-off” fees to dissuade passengers from getting lifts to the airport. This month, the Transport Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, said he was expecting Heathrow and Gatwick “to put forward ambitious solutions” on public transport to mitigate the impact of any future runway.

But the first-ever survey of public transport links to the UK's leading airports shows a wide variation in the three metrics that passengers want to be as low as they can possibly be – that's the fare, journey time, and waiting time.

We made a judgement about the main city served by each airport (not always as obvious as it might seem; for East Midlands we chose Nottingham rather than Derby or Leicester).

From published sources we then chose the leading form of transport from the airport to that city; usually the fastest (a train where one is available) but in the case of Heathrow, the Tube.

We also examined the average journey time and departure schedule during the middle of the day; in cases such as Manchester and Gatwick, where there are multiple options, for fast services. And we obtained the standard daytime fare. Then we multiplied the time, in minutes, by the average gap between services, in minutes, and by the fare, in pounds. (If you're interested, in order to dampen the extreme differences that this method generates we then took the cube root of this score.)

This generated a league table (see below) where low scores show better transport links.

The clear winner, Southampton, should hardly be a surprise; it has frequent seven-minute train connections from Southampton Central to the Airport Parkway station, barely four miles from the city. More impressive, arguably, was the performance of Birmingham and Manchester – much bigger airports, twice as far from the cities they serve.

Next in the list were the only two of the capital's airports that fall within Greater London. They benefit from the flat fares that the capital's zone system prescribes; off-peak prices from the centre, using a contactless bank card, are £2.80 to London City (pictured left) and £3.10 to Heathrow.

The last four places in the survey are taken up by London's other four airports: Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and Southend. This reflects the extra distance (30 miles or more) and the high fares that apply on what are predominantly commuter lines.

Yet canny travellers can find deals even to these airports. Gatwick, Luton and Stansted have a wide range of bus services, with fares from a few pounds. And even though transport options are few to Southend, the south-east Essex airport has many advantages. Like Southampton, it is small and remarkably passenger friendly, with an easy walk to and from a dedicated rail station. The high price of a train ticket is offset by lower air fares: on a day chosen at random, easyJet flights to Amsterdam from Southend were £9 cheaper than Luton and Stansted and £12 lower than Gatwick. And with no congestion the flight-time saving (10 minutes faster than Stansted, 15 for Luton and 20 for Gatwick) also acts in Southend airport's favour.

Airports rated: the lower the score, the better

1 Southampton 7

2 Birmingham 7.5

3 Manchester 8

4 London City 8.5

5 Heathrow 9

6 Aberdeen 9.5

7 Newcastle 10

8 Belfast City 10

9 Edinburgh 11

10 Glasgow 11

11 Leeds/Bradford 12

12 Bristol 13

13 Liverpool 14

14 Exeter 15

15 Inverness 15

16 East Midlands 17

17 Belfast International 17

18 Prestwick 17.5

19 Cardiff 18

20 Gatwick 21

21 Luton 21

22 Stansted 24

23 Southend 26