Consider airline performance when booking

Choosing which airline to fly with significantly impacts your overall travel experience, more than just the price of a ticket your airline’s performance affects the productivity of your business travel.  Airlines cannot be held accountable for extraordinary circumstances that are beyond their control like bad weather conditions, strikes or other outside influence but when looking negotiate preferred airline contracts – how does your airline of choice hold up against the 10 best airlines?

Recently AirHelp, a legal advocacy firm offering assistance to passengers published a global rankings list of 34 of the most and least efficient airlines; 3 key criteria were analyzed to determine the best and – worst – airlines in the world.

Analysis Criteria

• Quality and Services –  Based upon data from the impartial air transportation industry research advisors SKYTRAX, hundreds of metrics and details are qualitatively ranked to give insight to the true customer experience both on board and at the airport
• On-Time Performance – Statistic data for the past three months is pulled from FlightStats.com, analyzed to determine how likely it is your flight to be delayed.
• Claims Processing – How fair is your airline?  This metric takes into account the number of wrongfully rejected compensation claims, the amount of time it takes the airline to respond and pay out a claim.

Airlines were given a rank based on a scale of 10 to each of these categories with the average of these producing the overall AirHelp score.  The following ranked as the world’s 10 best airlines – listed in order followed by each carrier’s home country

10 Best Airlines:

1.     Qatar Airways – 8.9 – Qatar

2.     KLM- Royal Dutch Airlines – 8.5 – Netherlands

3.     Air Baltic Corporation – 8.2 – Latvia

4.     Air France – 8.2 – France

5.     Lufthansa German Airlines – 8.2 – Germany

6.     Air Canada – 8 – Canada

7.     Emirates – 7.9 – United Arab Emirates

8.     Croatia Airlines – 7.9  – Croatia

9.     British Airways – 7.8– United Kingdom

10.  Finnair – 7.8 – Finland

Now for the bottom – the world’s 10 worst airlines followed by AirHelp score and country.

10 Worst:

24. Ryanair – 7.1- Ireland

25. Norwegian Air Shuttle – 7.1 – Norway

26. Icelandair – 7 – Iceland

27. Alitalia – 7 – Italy

28. Iberia – 7 – Spain

29. Aer Lingus – 6.8 – Ireland

30. TAP Portugal – 6.8 – Portugal

31. Swiss International Air Lines – 6.4 – Switzerland

32. Virgin Atlantic Airways – 6.2 – United Kingdom

33. Easyjet – 5.8 – United Kingdom

34. Sata International – 5.2 – Portugal

Within the United States the top three carriers Delta, United and American are very closely ranked.  Delta’s on time performance and claim payout time help to the number one domestic spot ranked at 7.6.  United with the AirHelp score of 7.4 pulled slightly ahead of American’s 7.35 due to fair claim processing and quality of service.  Visit Airhelp’s website to see the full list.