UK airlines and airports scoff at survey that ranks them amongst world’s worst

UK airports and airlines have rubbished a global performance survey that ranked Stansted as the second-worst airport in the world and easyJet, Ryanair and Jet2 amongst the worst carriers.

The three-month survey by Airhelp said Stansted was only just ahead of Kuwait in terms of poor performance while Virgin Atlantic was the only UK carrier to make it into its top 10 league table.

Low-cost carrier easyJet was the lowest ranked airline of the UK-based carriers, coming 69th out of 72 airlines worldwide. Airhelp said its poor score was based largely on its low claims handling score of just 1.13 out of 10.

It ranked Ryanair only two places higher, while Jet2 came in at number 61. Thomas Cook found itself just outside the bottom 20 at number 51.

The survey, which was carried out between late December 2017 to late March, claimed to have looked at several factors including airlines’ on-time performance, quality of service and their claims processing for delayed and cancelled flights. For airports, it also measured Twitter sentiment.

However, Stansted described the survey as ‘a self-serving exercise’ designed by Airhelp to promote its claims management services.

An easyJet spokeswoman said: "We absolutely do not recognise these findings. easyJet takes its responsibilities under Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 extremely seriously and will always pay compensation when it is due.

"We offer simple webforms easily found on our website and are currently processing valid claims in less than 21 days. We have plans to further improve this payment processing time later this year.

"We want to make it as easy as possible for our passengers to claim with us directly rather than sacrificing a significant portion of their compensation to other organisations like AirHelp unnecessarily."

Ryanair was even more vigorous in its dismissing of the survey. "We don’t comment on fabricated ‘rankings’ produced by compensation chasing websites to generate publicity and we are amazed that newspapers publish them," said a spokesman.

"The fact that almost 90% of our flights are on time and we receive the fewest complaints highlights how irrelevant these ‘statistics’ are. Thanks to our unbeatable low fares and "Always Getting Better" customer service some 138 million customers will choose to fly Ryanair this year, making us Europe’s number one airline, the only ranking that matters.

"Furthermore our latest Rate My Flight statistics, based on a survey of real Ryanair customers in January, February and March, showed that over 92% rated their experience as good, very good or excellent, figures which speak for themselves."

Last year, Airhelp named Monarch as the worst UK airline and the fourth worst in the world shortly before the carrier went bust.

This year, Virgin overtook British Airways to become the UK’s highest ranking airline, coming in at number 10, while BA slipped from seventh to 21st place

Flybe also ranked highly this year(#14), although the airline was let down by a poor mark in the ‘quality of service category’.

Qatar was the highest ranked airline, with high scores in every category, while Doha’s Hamad International Airport was considered the best.

The report found the UK has four airports amongst the 20 worst in the world. Stansted came bottom, due largely to its poor Twitter sentiment, followed by Gatwick, which was ranked 123rd out of 141. Edinburgh and Manchester came in 134 and 136 respectively.

A Stansted Airport spokesman said: "Stansted is the fastest growing London airport with passengers voting with their feet in record numbers – we will serve 29 million passengers this year – and is investing significant sums of money to ensure that our passengers are provided with the high levels of customer experience that they are entitled to.

"However, as with their previous PR initiatives, this latest survey from AirHelp is purely a self-serving exercise based on very little or no substantive evidence and designed to promote a company seeking to take a share of flight compensation claims."

Heathrow, which has just won ministerial backing for its plans to build a third runway, was considered to be the UK’s top airport but ranked only 81 globally by Airhelp.

"For some time now UK airports have seemingly been in the news for all the wrong reasons and that has been realised in this data", said AirHelp CEO and co-founder Henrik Zillmer. "The UK is enviably positioned when it comes to physical movement of people globally, but this report needs to serve as a wake-up call when it comes to actual performance. Passengers are clearly not happy and while it will be a challenge to address the issues highlighted in this report, it is also an opportunity to halt the decline in performance and provide consumers with a better experience."