AirHelp Score 2022: How did we rank the airports?

AirHelp Score 2022: How did we rank the airports?

Last updated on 12 December 2022

AirHelp’s annual AirHelp Score took a hiatus during the pandemic due to lower numbers of passengers taking flights. This year's recovery of passenger numbers means that we were able to collect the data needed to build the Score for 2022.

Where does the data come from? In order to ensure a reliable ranking, we’ve taken factual information on each airports’ on-time performance, pulled from our own extensive database, and combined it with passenger insight on the facilities and experience of using the airports.

This score looks at flights taken from 1st January to 31st October 2022.

There are over 4,000 airports in our database, but we whittled the ranking down to 151, based on the busiest airports according to flight traffic, and most popular with air travelers. We aim to capture the world’s major airports, but it’s worth noting that some airports are excluded due to a lack of data. 

3 factors contribute to airport ranking. Here’s a breakdown:

1. On-time Performance (60% of the score) 

In order to help passengers facing flight delays and cancellations, we have developed a database of flight data that we believe ranks among the most reliable and accurate in the world. 

Thanks to our database, we can find the on-time flight departure and arrival statistics for every airport. 

What counts as ‘on time’? 

We count any flight that arrived within 15 minutes of its published arrival time as an on-time flight. For this year's score, we looked at flights for the period of 1st January to 31st October 2022. 

We calculated how many flights were on time and expressed this number as a percentage. The higher the score, the higher the percentage of on-time flights. For example, a score of 8.5 means 85% of flights were on time. 

What makes the AirHelp database so reliable? 

  • Data is gathered from multiple vendors and processed by us to create our sophisticated database. 

  • We cross-reference data with a variety of reliable sources such as government agencies, airport data, flight-tracking vendors, and historical resources to ensure our database accuracy. 

  • When we identify conflicting sources we do not 'estimate' or take an average. Instead, we rank our sources by authority, taking the most authoritative figure to be correct.

2. Customer opinion (20% of the score) 

To assess what passengers think of the airports, we simply asked them! We surveyed air travelers in more than 30 countries, and gathered over 9,500 unique airport ratings.  

We asked travelers to rate the airports they had most recently visited on 4 factors: 

  • Airport staff 

  • Wait times 

  • Accessibility 

  • Cleanliness

We asked passengers to rate each airport for each factor on a scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’. We gave each rating a numeric value from 1 - 5, and added these ratings together to arrive at a final score. The higher the score, the better the airport did across all of these service factors.

3. Food and Shops (20% of the score) 

We also asked travelers to rate the shops and restaurants at the airports they’d visited. 

Again, passengers rated each airport on a scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’. We gave each rating a numeric value from 1 - 5, and added these ratings together to arrive at a final score. The higher the score, the better passengers rate the shops and restaurants there.

The Final Score 

We take the score from each category into account, giving precedence to On-time Performance, as we believe this should out-weigh the importance of Service Quality and Food and Shops. 

The breakdown of the final score is as follows:

  • On-time Performance contributes 60%

  • Service Quality contributes 20% 

  • Food and Shops contributes 20% 

Back to AirHelp Score Airports Ranking

Did you also know that you can claim compensation for delayed, canceled, or overbooked flights from up to 3 years ago? AirHelp is here to help you check if your flight is eligible — it’s quick, easy, and totally risk-free! 

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