A report – carried out by flight compensation company AirHelp – found that the UK air travel industry is performing poorly across the board, with both UK airlines and airports receiving damning feedback.
Low-cost airlines in particular performed poorly with easyJet coming in as the lowest ranked airline of the UK-based carriers, based largely on its poor claims handling score.
EasyJet has refuted the criticism, however. A spokesperson from the airline told Express.co.uk, “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.”
Budget airline Ryanair only fared marginally better than easyJet, coming in two places higher. A Ryanair spokesperson told Express.co.uk, “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 138m customers will choose to fly Ryanair this year, making us Europe’s No.1 airline, the only ranking that matters.”
Jet2 was just outside the bottom 10 carriers in the world, according to the report, while Thomas Cook found itself just outside the bottom 20. Express.co.uk has contacted both airlines for comment.
At the other end of the spectrum was Virgin Atlantic, which is the highest ranked carrier and rated number 10 in the world, with mostly positive scores across the board.
Flybe also featured highly at number 14, although was let down by a poor mark in the ‘quality of service category’. UK national carrier, British Airways, was ranked at 21.
For the annual report AirHelp analysed a series of key performance indicators for air travel looking at factors including on-time performance and quality of service. It also measured Twitter sentiment for every airport while also measuring claim processing as KPI for the airlines.
The study revealed that the UK has four airports in the poorest 20 in the world.
Stanstead is the UK’s worst performing airport, according to the report, and was ranked second bottom in the global list, driven largely by poor Twitter sentiment.
A London Stansted spokesperson said of the result, “Stansted is the fastest growing London airport 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.
“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.”
London Heathrow was cited as the UK’s best performing airport in the report.
This is largely driven by a high rating when it came to on-time performance and gaining 8/10 for quality of service.
However, it still lags well behind the number one ranked airport, Hamad International Airport, Doha, Qatar, which was nine or above on both accounts.
“This is a double-whammy for UK consumers so it’s little surprised they’re feeling frustrated,” said AirHelp CEO and co-founder Henrik Zillmer.
“They’re moving from a poorly performing airport to an equally underachieving airline and something needs to be done.”
