If you are flying often and have a choice of airports – or even considering moving near an airport to take advantage of cheap flights for weekend sojourns to your second home, it pays to check out the airports you’ll use.

With budget airlines expanding their routes to local airports, it's a boom time for regional flyers. But are the smaller, local airports up there with the best or acting as the back marker asks Holiday Which? in its report on the best and not so best of the UK's top 14 airports.

At the smaller airports such as Bristol, Liverpool and Luton, Holiday Which? found sleek modern terminals and slick operation to go with it. Smaller airports also won hands down for being easier to navigate, which included departure gates close to lounges, rather than a journey in themselves.

However, at smaller airports facilities such as food outlets and shops can still be pretty limited. At Cardiff airport there's just one shop on landside (before passport control) and at Bristol airport it's impossible to get a hot meal airside (after passport control). Smaller airports clearly still need to improve and expand if they are to cope with the expected growth in air travel.

In the meantime cramped check-in halls and a lack of natural light are more likely to be complaints at bigger airports, with the check-in at Heathrow 1 and 2 a particularly depressing experience. Airports, big and small, were also guilty of not properly separating smokers from non smokers.

When it came to food, Holiday Which? found that most of the airports settled for run-of-the-mill food courts, canteen services, outlets for coffee, pastries, sandwiches - plus a burger bar. Heathrow (3) won the overall Best Food Choice category, with Newcastle coming tops for the best breakfast. Generally, Belfast International and Birmingham stood out among the smaller airports for eateries while Bristol and Glasgow were disappointing, and of the larger airports, Stansted was deemed to have the most limited choice.

Travellers can expect at least a modest range of shops at most airports, but when it comes to saving money, Holiday Which? found that while shopping at the airport may be convenient, it isn't always necessarily cheaper. Chart CD's, for example, were cheaper when purchased from nearby supermarkets opposed to airport terminals - £4 cheaper at Manchester.

The magazine also looked at transport links to and from the airports, noting that at Belfast International, Bristol, Cardiff, East Midlands and Edinburgh there are no train links to the airport and at Glasgow, Liverpool and Luton the train station is a bus ride away from the airport. Only Luton provides a free shuttle bus.

Patricia Yates, Editor of Holiday Which? said, “Smaller airports often compare favourably with their bigger counterparts, but a lot of work still needs to be done if they are to cope with the rapid growth of passenger numbers. In particular with regards transport links which could be a lot better at several of the airports we visited.”