AirHelp Score: How did we rank the airlines?
Our 2025 ranking of the world's best-known airlines is out now! In this edition we've compared the stats of 117 airlines to work out which offer you the best experience in the skies.
Here's how we calculate each score:
The AirHelp Score combines a lot of information! We factor in stats on airlines’ on-time performance, customers’ opinions based on their own flying experience, and our unique data on how airlines behave when flights don't go to plan.
We aim to rank the most popular and best-known airlines. From a list of over 800 airlines around the world, we selected the biggest in terms of passenger numbers and popularity. Sometimes airlines are excluded where we are unable to get data.
To help you understand our ratings, we’ve broken down the 3 metrics we use in the airline AirHelp Score.
On-time performance
AirHelp maintains a database of flight data that ranks among the most reliable and accurate in the world. We use our database to find statistics for every flight between 1st October 2024 - 30th September 2025. Then we calculate how many of any given airline’s flights were on time.
On-time performance contributes 33.33% of the score
What counts as ‘on time’?
Any flight that arrived within 15 minutes of its published arrival time is an on-time flight. We calculated how many flights were on time and expressed this number as a percentage. The higher the score, the higher the percentage of flights arriving on time. For example, a score of 8.5 means 85% of flights were on time.
What makes the AirHelp database so reliable?
AirHelp collects data from multiple commercial vendors. We combine this data to create our own sophisticated database of flight data.
To ensure our database ranks among the most accurate available, we cross-reference our statistics with a variety of reliable sources including government agencies, airport databanks, flight-tracking vendors and historical resources.
If we find any conflict between sources, we do not 'estimate' an average of the time. Instead, we rank sources by authority, taking the most authoritative figure to be true.
Customer opinion
To assess the quality an airline's service, we simply ask the people who use them.
We ran hundreds of surveys where we asked air travelers from more than 60 countries for their opinions — and we collected over 11,500 rankings of airlines.
We asked passengers to rate the airlines they had most recently flown with on 5 factors:
Cabin crew
Aircraft comfort
Aircraft cleanliness
Food offering
Entertainment onboard
Passengers rated each factor on a scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’. We gave each rating a numeric value, and averaged these ratings to arrive at a final score. The higher the score, the better the airline did across all of these service factors.
Customer opinion contributes 33.33% of the score
Claim processing
We believe that an airline should be assessed not just by how they treat their passengers during business as usual, but also by the consideration they show customers when things go wrong. We have unique insight into this thanks to our own data on how well airlines process valid customer claims for compensation.
To arrive at a score, we break their performance down into multiple factors:
How likely an airline is to pay out compensation for a valid claim
The total volume of claims an airline is processing
Both past and current claim processing behaviors are taken into account
The higher the score, the better the airline has performed.
Claim processing contributes 33.33% of the score
The Final Score
Each of the above categories contributes equally to the airline's overall score and 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!